Posted on 03/25/2014 10:23:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Not too long ago, the Greens of Oklahoma City were law-abiding people running an arts-and-crafts chain called Hobby Lobby.
They weren’t disturbing the peace, or denying anyone his or her rights. They were minding their own business — quite successfully and in keeping with their Christian faith. The roughly 600 Hobby Lobby stores stock Christian products, close on Sundays, and play Christian music.
Then one day Uncle Sam showed up to make an offer that the Greens couldn’t refuse — literally. As part of Obamacare, federal law demands that the chain cover contraceptives that the Greens consider abortifacients. The family decided it couldn’t comply with the law in good conscience, and its case is now before the Supreme Court.
Hobby Lobby went from an inoffensive business to a scofflaw and an alleged combatant in the “war on women” in no time at all — and without changing any significant employment or business practice. Thus is the transformation wrought by the coercive sweep of Obamacare, which risks doing as much damage to conscience rights as it has done to the insurance market.
Hobby Lobby is trying to fend off the federal government via the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law that Democrats used to support before they realized how inconvenient it would prove to the Obama-era project of running roughshod over moral traditionalists. The act says that government can’t substantially burden someone’s exercise of religion unless there’s a compelling governmental interest at stake and it’s pursued by the least restrictive means.
The contraception mandate fails on all counts, as Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has demonstrated in his incisive writings on the case. The Obama administration has admitted that the mandate is a burden on religious exercise through its own regulatory actions. It exempted a small category of “religious employers” (e.g., churches) for just this reason. The Department of Health and Human Services explained that “it is appropriate” to take into account the “effect on the religious beliefs of certain religious employers if coverage of contraceptive services were required.”
It is hard to see how the government has a “compelling interest” in the mandate, when the vast majority of employers already cover contraceptives and the administration has exempted many employers with no religious objections by grandfathering their pre-mandate insurance plans.
There are certainly less restrictive means of widening access to contraception. Whelan points out that government could find another, more direct way to distribute or subsidize contraceptives, without forcing any employer to pay for contraceptives that it considers immoral.
The administration argues that the owners of a for-profit corporation have no free-exercise rights, although this runs counter to common sense and the law. Everyone recognizes that nonprofit corporations have such rights, so what makes for-profit corporations different? Besides, Congress went out of its way to define the ambit of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to include “any exercise of religion,” in order to create “a broad protection of religious exercise.”
Hobby Lobby is now bizarrely portrayed as wanting to barge into examination rooms. “Selectively denying insurance coverage for contraceptive methods an employer considers sinful,” the liberal legal lion Walter Dellinger wrote in the Washington Post, “makes the employer a party to a woman’s medical consultations.” And here the Greens thought they were just selling glue, scrapbook paper, beads, and the like.
The truth is that the Obama administration wants to bring Hobby Lobby to heel as a matter of principle. In its pinched view of religion, faith should be limited as much as possible to the pews. In its attenuated regard for civil society, it believes government should overawe any person, business, or institution whose beliefs run counter to officially sanctioned attitudes.
Make no mistake, the culture war is alive and well, and the aggressor isn’t Hobby Lobby. The Greens will be happy to go back to minding their own business — if the federal government sees fit to permit them.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
Here is the Hobby Lobby Case in a nutshell ( now being heard by the Supreme Court ):
Who are the families challenging the HHS mandate?
The family of David Green founded Hobby Lobby in 1972, after two years of making frames at their kitchen table and selling arts and crafts out of their garage. What started as a humble enterprise has grown to more than 500 stores in 41 states, employing more than 16,000 individuals. Hobby Lobby stores close on Sundays and are open only 66 hours a week so that their employees can spend more time with their families. The Greens’ Evangelical Christian faith influences not only the way they care for employees but their investment in communities through partnerships with numerous Christian ministries.
Norman and Elizabeth Hahn own Conestoga Wood Specialties, a second-generation business in Lancaster County, Pa. The Hahns’ work is a family affair, as their sons and their families also work at the cabinet-manufacturing business. With 950 employees, the Hahns simply want to continue working and providing employee health insurance according to their Christian Mennonite faith.
What are they suing over?
The Hahns and the Greens are at the Supreme Court fighting for the freedom to continue living out their faith in how they run their business. They simply want to go on providing their employees with generous health-care plans without being forced to provide coverage of drugs and devices that can end the life of a human embryo.
The families brought claims under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The law, passed by large bipartisan majorities in 1993, prohibits imposing substantial government burdens on religious exercise unless the government can show it has a compelling interest and does so through the least restrictive means possible. That’s a pretty high bar, and one the government has failed to meet in enforcing the HHS mandate.
What happens if Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood don’t comply with the mandate?
The Greens’ and the Hahns’ businesses could face devastating fines — to the tune of up to $100 per employee per day (which adds up to many millions of dollars a year) — for continuing to provide health insurance that doesn’t include life-ending drugs and devices. If they drop their health plans altogether to avoid the mandate, they’ll still face fines of $2,000 per employee per year under Obamacare.
Aren’t there already religious protections in this mandate?
The religious exemption included in the HHS mandate is one of the narrowest in federal policy. It effectively applies only to formal houses of worship, such as a church or synagogue. After public outcry over the mandate’s coercion of religious organizations, the Obama administration created what it calls an “accommodation” to extend religious-freedom protections. But that so-called compromise applies only to certain religious non-profits and is nothing more than a complicated way of enforcing the mandate against religious charities while pretending not to. Everyone else, including family businesses such as Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, must comply or face crippling fines.
What is the government’s position?
While claiming the mandate is necessary for women’s health, the Obama administration has exempted the health-care plans of tens of millions of women from the HHS mandate — often for merely political or commercial reasons. But the government is unrelenting in enforcing this mandate against a relatively small number of family businesses that simply want to provide health care without being forced to violate their conscience under threat of heavy fines.
Throughout the litigation over the rule, the Obama administration essentially argued that families such as the Greens and the Hahns lost their right to religious freedom when they went into business to provide for themselves, their families, and their employees.
I pray this bravado shows with HL is the same kind of bravado Goliath faced when meeting David.
HL - take the SOB down for the count.
And remember one thing folks ( despite what the liberal blowhards will want to tell you ) — THIS CASE IS NOT ABOUT TAKING AWAY ANYONE’s BIRTH CONTROL..
All women, including those who work for Hobby Lobby, remain free to make their own decisions about these drugs and devices — and to purchase or find insurance coverage for them.
Hobby Lobby simply ask that the government not force them to participate in those decisions.
The issue in the case is quite fundamental:
Should the government pick and choose who gets to live out their faith?
I hope he loses all of it....Mandated in an insurance policy for NO ONE.....Buy your own damn pills or go to PP.
And remember one thing folks ( despite what the liberal blowhards will want to tell you ) — THIS CASE IS NOT ABOUT TAKING AWAY ANYONE’s BIRTH CONTROL..
All women, including those who work for Hobby Lobby, remain free to make their own decisions about these drugs and devices — and to purchase or find insurance coverage for them.
Hobby Lobby simply ask that the government not force them to participate in those decisions.
The issue in the case is quite fundamental:
Should the government pick and choose who gets to live out their faith?
I don’t think we can rely on judges to overturn bad legislation.
The voters elected this crap. Only the voters can undo it IMHO.
Our founders are rolling over in their graves.
I agree it is innately fundamental. However, I thought the SC case on Obamacare’s constitutionality was ‘fundamental’ too.
Roberts’ collusion in legitimizing it showed me that the Constitution means nothing to them (and to a hell of a lot of RINOs too).
It’s my belief now that ‘right’ won’t prevail on its own - God has to be in there somewhere executing his will.
Romney said, “Corporations are people.” If Hobby Lobby wins this one that’ll be proof positive.
I only shop Hobby Lobby for the art supplies I use - the store is less than a mile from my home. We have freedom or we don’t - that is what is at stake. Obama is a vengeful anti-Christian swine.
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
We Orthodox never read the Apocalypse of St. John the Theologian liturgically, but we know what it says, and can recognized the spirit of Antichrist when we see it. The Federal Government's position in this case is at once a precursor to the mark of the beast, and a replay of the Roman persecution: just offer a grain of incense to the "divine" Emperor...
RE: The voters elected this crap. Only the voters can undo it IMHO.
Unfortunately, the above only works in theory.
I hasten to remind you that California VOTED in a 2 referendums at least to define marriage as between ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN.
The courts OVERTURNED the results of the referendum.
Oklahoma had a referendum overwhelmingly approving a law Prohibiting State Courts from Applying International or Sharia Law in their decision.
It was ruled unconstitutional by a Federal judge.
It has come to a point in this country where a few men and women in a bench can overturn the will of millions of people.
And actually Hobby Lobby's insurance covers most forms of birth control. It's just IUDs and emergency contraceptives that they don't want to cover, on the grounds that they terminate a fertilized egg and destroy life.
RE: Romney said, “Corporations are people.” If Hobby Lobby wins this one that’ll be proof positive.
I am hopeful but not optimistic, after what John Roberts did with the individual mandate....
If we had real JUDGES, this issue wouldn’t being discussed.
The referenced article sidesteps the major constitutional problem that, regardless what activist justices want everybody to think about the constitutionally of constitutionality indefensible Obamacare Democratcare, the states have never delegated to Congress, via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate, tax and spend for public healthcare purposes. This is evidenced by the following excerpt from a case opinion which has been referenced in related FR threads.
”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress. (emphases added)” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
If the states want Congress to regulate, tax and spend for public healthcare purposes, then the states have to amend the Constitution to expressly grant Congress the specific power to do so.
Liberalism has gone full-circle - from criticizing “Sunday-only” Christianity as a false disengagement from the world, to insisting that Christianity be confined within church walls and formal worship services. That is UNLESS church activity outside of worship services is devoted to liberal social causes.
After Hobby Lobby wins this case, they will be subjected to full-court-press liberal bullying:
- boycotts
- MSM ‘investigations’ into every aspect of the Green family
- picketing in front of their stores by the SEIU
- allegations of racism
- ridicule by the Daily Show and the Colbert Report
You know, the usual drill when liberals don’t get their way.
You are quite correct. I live in CA. I know. We passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman back in 2008, only to have overturned in court-—both the state supreme court and the US Supreme Court. Our elected governor and AG would not defend it.
Unfortunately conservatives rarely win court decisions. We lost on Obamacare. We are losing left and right on same sex marriage. Our only recourse is the ballot box. We-—meaning we conservatives-—cannot rely on judges and courts like the liberals can to do our bidding. The ballot box is our only recourse. To completely repeal Obamacare we will need a GOP president and both houses of congress all on the same page. Nothing short of that will repeal Obamacare once and for all.
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