Posted on 11/20/2012 1:12:51 PM PST by NYer
A federal judge has issued a ruling siding with the Obama administration saying that it has the right to force Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned and run company, to pay for drugs for women that may cause abortions.
The privately held retail chain with more than 500 arts and crafts stores in 41 states filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its HHS mandate. The company says it would face $1.3 million in fines on a daily basis starting in January if it fails to comply with the mandate, which requires religious employers to pay for or refer women for abortion-cause drugs that violate their conscience or religious beliefs.
The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma and the business says it is opposing the Health and Human Services “preventive services” mandate, which it says forces the Christian-owned-and-operated business to provide, without co-pay, the “morning after pill” and “week after pill” in their health insurance plan, or face crippling fines up to 1.3 million dollars per day.
“By being required to make a choice between sacrificing our faith or paying millions of dollars in fines, we essentially must choose which poison pill to swallow,” said David Green, Hobby Lobby CEO and founder. “We simply cannot abandon our religious beliefs to comply with this mandate.”
However, U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton issued a ruling late Monday rejecting Hobby Lobby’s request to block the mandate. Judge Heaton said that the company doesn’t qualify for an exemption because it is not a church or religious group.
“Plaintiffs have not cited, and the court has not found, any case concluding that secular, for-profit corporations such as Hobby Lobby and Mardel have a constitutional right to the free exercise of religion,” the ruling said.
Heaton wrote that “the court is not unsympathetic” to the company’s desire to not pay for abortion-causing drugs but he said the Obamacare law
“results in concerns and issues not previously confronted by companies or their owners.”
“The question of whether the Greens can establish a free exercise constitutional violation by reason of restrictions or requirements imposed on general business corporations they own or control involves largely uncharted waters,” Heaton wrote.
Hobby Lobby plans to appeal the ruling, according to a pro-life legal group that notified LifeNews of the ruling.
“Every American, including family business owners like the Greens, should be free to live and do business according to their religious beliefs,” Kyle Duncan, general counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said. “We disagree with this decision and we will immediately appeal it.”
The court did not question that the Green family has sincere religious beliefs forbidding them from participating in abortion. The court ruled, however, that those beliefs were only “indirectly” burdened by the mandate’s requirement that they provide free coverage for specific, abortion-inducing drugs in Hobby Lobby’s self-funded insurance plan.
Duncan previously talked about what the Obama administration told the court:
The administration’s arguments in this case are shocking. Here’s what they are saying: once someone starts a “secular” business, he categorically loses any right to run that business in accordance with his conscience. The business owner simply leaves her First Amendment rights at home when she goes to work at the business she built. Kosher butchers around the country must be shocked to find that they now run “secular” businesses. On this view of the world, even a seller of Bibles is “secular.” Hobby Lobby’s affiliate, Mardel, sells Bibles and other Christian-themed material, but because it makes a profit the government has now declared it “secular.”
The administration’s position here — while astonishing — is actually consistent with its overall view of the place of religion in civil society. After all, this is the administration who argued in the Hosanna-Tabor case last year in the Supreme Court that the religion clauses of the First Amendment offered no special protection to a church’s right to choose its ministers — a position that the Court rejected 9-0. This is the administration which has taken to referring to “freedom of worship” instead of “freedom of religion” — suggesting that religious freedom consists in being free to engage in private rituals and prayers, but not in carrying your religious convictions into public life. And this is the administration who crafted a “religious employer” exemption to the HHS mandate so narrow that a Catholic charity does not qualify for conscience protection if it serves non-Catholic poor people.
As you point out, the administration is trying to justify its rigid stance against religious business owners by saying otherwise they would become a “law unto themselves,” and be able to do all sorts of nasty things to their employees — like force them to attend Bible studies, or fire them if they denied the divinity of Christ. Nonsense. Hobby Lobby isn’t arguing for the right to impose the Greens’ religion on employees, nor for the right to fire employees of different religions. There’s already a federal law that protects employees from religious discrimination and that’s a very good thing. This case is about something entirely different: it’s about stopping the government from coercing religious business owners. The government wants to fine the Greens if they do not violate their own faith by handing out free abortion drugs, and now it’s saying they don’t even have the right to complain in court about it
Duncan said the onerous provisions of the HHS mandate “will hit Hobby Lobby in about two months — on January 1, 2013. At that point, it will face the choice of dropping employee health insurance altogether (and paying about $26 million a year in penalties), or continuing its current plan (which will expose it to about $1.3 million in fines per day). So it is not hard to imagine why the Greens felt they had no choice but to go to court.”
There are now 40 separate lawsuits challenging the HHS mandate, which is a regulation under the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”). The Becket Fund led the charge against the unconstitutional HHS mandate, and along with Hobby Lobby represents: Wheaton College, East Texas Baptist University, Houston Baptist University, Belmont Abbey College, Colorado Christian University, the Eternal Word Television Network, and Ave Maria University.
Hobby Lobby is the largest and the biggest non-Catholic-owned business to file a lawsuit against the HHS mandate, focusing sharp criticism on the administration’s regulation that forces all companies, regardless of religious conviction, to cover abortion-inducing drugs. It has faced a small boycott from liberals upset that it would challenge the mandate in court.
The Obama admin says there is an exemption in the statute but Duncan says that is not acceptable.
“The safe harbor’s protection is illusory,” said Duncan. “Even though the government won’t make religious colleges pay crippling fines this year, private lawsuits can still be brought, schools are at a competitive disadvantage for hiring and retaining faculty, and employees face the specter of battling chronic conditions without access to affordable care. This mandate puts these religious schools in an impossible position.”
Last week, a federal court stopped enforcement of the Obama administration’s abortion pill mandate against a Bible publisher which filed a lawsuit against it — the third such victory.
Nice dodge, yourself. Since when do the demands of an employee, who has voluntarily taken a position with a company, mean that the company’s officers are required to violate their first amendment rights?
The key fact you are glossing over is that the employees have the right to self-terminate their employment and seek employment elsewhere, at a company that will provide such coverage.
Contraception and abortifacients are not found in the constitution.
that could be intended to mean a do-good-du-jour social gospel i suppose...
and, what is the role of old fashioned charity in this anyhow? when churches got beguiled into thinking newfangled government schemes like social security could supersede the duties of old fashioned charity, they got themselves onto the wrong footing.
I’ve offered this solution repeatedly, on this thread and on others, and so far no one seems to have acknowledged this option for Hobby Lobby and for other organizations in the same boat, like Catholic hospitals or Protestant conservative schools.
Fire the employees. You don’t have any employees anymore except for a core group of less than fifty managers. Tell the employees that you love them, you’d be delighted to hire them back, but they have to work as contractors. As contractors they will not be eligible for health insurance obtained through your firm, but you will now be able to afford to pay them more. Sorry. Blame Obama.
In this way the company continues to operate, the former employees continue to work, and the company’s owners are not fined $1.3 million per day. But as more companies and religious organizations take this option, the unemployment rolls are going to EXPLODE. That is not going to look nice for Obama.
Even financially, why are Democrats making that the hill to die upon? This stuff isn’t hugely costly (in dollars... the cost in souls may vary), and a saner plan would be to let it be purchased using the same tax shielded medical reimbursement schemes that can be used to tax shield the purchase of aspirin.
So, are you endorsing the idea that "adequate policies" must necessarily include abortions? That seems to be a clear inference in your statement, quoted in whole above.
inference from, or implication by
You are correct - I should have said “implication”.
As for the selection of the contraception/abortion - it is not the cost that democrats crave, but rather the violation of faith. I see abortion as the primary sacrament of liberalism, personally.
And things have come almost full circle with the organizational legacy of the late ungreat Margaret Sanger coming to a fruition that would have made her gasp. (She might not have been so copacetic with welfare handouts, but she’d be right on with all the abortion.)
The larger the cost sharing pool and the more real competition, the better the insurance deals would be. Up til now, we've relied almost entirely on employment for health coverage. That, coupled with a ban on interstate sale of insurance, has led to much smaller cost-sharing pools and very little actual competition, with one insurer often dominating entire regions. Fifty different sets of rules and regulations have historically governed insurance sales across the country, with consumers almost always bound to their employer’s choice for health coverage – and worse, should they lose their job, finding themselves suddenly without any insurance at all.
It's hard to defend such an ad hoc "system" with its innate inefficiencies and skyrocketing costs.
The argument that no modern, industrialized nation should be without universal coverage is persuasive. But other Western nations have found ways to achieve it through far more decentralized means than Canadian-style single payer, or the expensive socialized medicine of the UK. The Dutch --- I've read --- have achieved universal coverage entirely through fierce competition between private insurers, and the Germans use a system of exchanges that allow German workers to move from job to job without losing insurance. The Swiss, who have made an art of subsidiarity, have achieved universal coverage through competing non-profit insurance plans.
I myself would like to see a competitive system with the following features:
Good point.
I think that you're on the wrong forum. DU might be more to your liking.
I’m told that I’m wrong and that the IRS doesn’t permit this.
OK, new idea: vouchers. The employees get vouchers from HL to go out and get whatever kind of insurance they want.
I suppose the Geheime Staatspolizei in the White House won’t permit this or any other innovative solution. You vill obey orders! Sieg Heil, y’all.
Twenty-seven year old children? Doesn’t anybody grow up and reach adulthood anymore? They are supposed to be adults WAY before the age of 27 and if they are not it is the fault of the parents. They need to get out of mommy and daddy’s basement, get a job and pay for their own insurance.
Erm, they don't need a case; it's explicitly in the Constitution -- Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There are multiple flaws w/ Obamacare; but the one that you're trying to goad on is simple: nowhere in the Constitution is the Federal government allowed to mandate insurance coverage. In short, Obamacare is a bad apple, and yes your suggestion of mandated health insurance is a bad apple as well, completely apart from the first amendment.
But there's no "adversely affecting" going on here: in a world where health insurance is not mandatory/regulated the employee is free to sign up with an employer who offers the health insurance he wants, not take health insurance, or purchase his own. -- So, no, not in this case.
What!?
Do you even know where that "example" came from? It came from Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919); this case was about upholding sedition laws for WWI which restricted political speech -- exactly the sort of speech the 1St Amendment was meant to protect -- protesting the war. (The case was wrongly decided, basically saying: the congress can do in war what it cannot do in peace.)
The whole "fire in a crowded theater"-argument is one that justifies that which is not justifiable: it is the expansion of "legal reading" of the Constitution to mean that which is not said. -- For you to use it only perpetuates the evil.
Do you disagree with that?
The rest of the Schenck case is not relevant to this particular concept set forth by the Court in Schenck, and I'd like to see any evidence you have that the founders intended for the 1st Amendment to protect speech without any limitations. I think any reasonable understanding of the 1st Amendment doesn't suggest that it, for example, would protect conspirators from prosecution since they were free to say whatever they wanted, or a bank robber since his statement "give me the money or else" would somehow be protected speech.
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