The government lawyer is correct. Corporations have no religious freedom, because they are creations of the government - not God.
Human beings have religious freedom. Human beings working together in a business have religious freedom.
But a corporation? That’s a paper person - and that’s what all these laws address.
Watching the entire population of the country refuse to grapple with this difference and constantly get smacked by the very thing they refuse to acknowledge is depressing as hell.
I get what your saying but can you explains Citizens United then in this context where freedom of speech is accorded to corporate personhood?
corporations are not inanimate objects, they are owned and run by people. And those people have opinions and beliefs that should be safe from government coercion
And the Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have free speech rights vis-a-vis campaign contributions.
Is it a stretch that the Court might also rule that corpoations have freedom of religion? I think not ...
“Chief Justice Roberts raised the point that corporations can actually file racial discrimination claims. So he said if a corporation can have a race, why can’t it have a religious claim? The government’s attorney didn’t really have an answer for that,” Ruse said."
Corporations are collections of individuals uniting to operate a joint business. If individuals do not have the right to act collectively then there are no rights.
But I thought that the court had said corporations are people in the Citizens United case.
By that definition, there isn’t a single marriage in the US that isn’t a corporation. As such, why is there spousal privilege?
I know we filed our license with the secretary of state, which made our property community, and gave each other power of attorney over each of us individually.
That’s a company. A not-for-profit company, but certainly a company.
SCOTUS already ruled corporations are entitled to speech the same as any individual citizen. Are we not splitting 1A in half for companies here? You can speak, but not about God?
So, if I took 10 percent of my profit, and gave it to a church, isn’t that a form of speech, same as if I gave my money to a PAC?
Wouldn’t that be looked at by the church as tithing, and thus, prayer?
The first thing I did when I saw your comment was check your sign up date.
(that’s not a compliment)
What do you think a corporation is if not human beings working together? My wife and I are a corporation. My brother is one also. I worked for one that consisted of a man and his son. We know lots of corporations like that. Should we be denied the right to practice our religion and follow our conscience because of the legal form we have chosen for our businesses? Even huge corporations are owned by real people. I own shares in Coca Cola, Ford, British Petroleum and others. Are only partnerships, proprietorships and LLCs allowed freedom of religion?
Some individuals are corporations. For example, a lawyer may likely be a professional services corporation. An entertainer may be a corporation.
In a similar vein, certain wedding service providers may not allow themselves to participate in a perversity of marriage known as homosexual marriage. The question is do they have the right to refrain from participating in an activity that is clearly a violation of their religious teaching? The answer is yes they do have that right but the state says they concurrently lose the right to be in business.
Returning to Hobby Lobby the same question arises: does Hobby Lobby have the right to select which health coverage they pay for as compensation for their employees?
From a different perspective the recognition that employee benefits are in fact a compensation to employees as a part of their overall pay package, does the government have the authority to decide for employers what an employee compensation package should look like?
The benefits of employer sponsored health plans are lower costs and higher coverage. Individual plans cannot compete with employer sponsored plans. To force, as Sotomayor said, employers to drop their sponsored health plans and allow employees to go to the exchanges is to consign an employee’s health to an inferior plan with an ultimate risk of death due to lack of coverage or lack of doctors. But even putting aside this argument of hysterical reality, it is important to note the government is interfering with a business’ model when a remedy would be to simply tax the employee.
Without any religious argument, an employer should be free to choose the total compensation plan for their employees. In fact, this is often a part of a business plan as a retention policy as well as an action of business branding.
A company may be known by how it treats its employees and for many companies it is their employees that represent the most important asset of the company.
What the government is doing is back-handed. They are forcing a cost on the employer without that cost represented as a tax. If an employee paycheck had a field for an abortion related tax, then the roles and responsibilities would be much clearer.
a corporation is owned by people
it is an entity based on that ownership
ownership is property
an owner whose property can be turned against his religious principles is an owner whose “private property” is a fiction
no private property and you can kiss most your other rights goodbye as well
controlling private property is the road to total control
They were ruled to have 1st Amendment rights in campaign contributions. If they are afforded that, then it is illogical they have no religious freedom as that is part and parcel to 1st Amendment protections.
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Isn’t the US Constitution a creation of government and not god?
Hobby Lobby is private ownership not a public shareholder held company. It’s the man and his family’s company and he should be able to run it as he sees fit. The same for church owned or ran hospitals. It’s tyranny to impose governments mandates which violate ones conscience before GOD. We fought a war over this and won our nations freedom. Lawyers many who are as disconnected from Founding Fathers Intent and their own personal conscience themselves worship twisting laws rather than making certain tyranny is stopped. They worship at the alter of their professions subversion and dismanteling of freedoms and rights given to man by GOD our Creator.
The corporation is a legal entity created under duress.
Without Big Government, at the point of a gun, forceing people to use the corporate identity to operate, people would simply work together in loose association.
A paper person has rights. That is the reason for creating the concept of paper persons.
What you meant was soul. A corporation has no soul, but having a soul is not necessary to have rights