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.
I don't think so. Any kids you had at age 24 or older could still be eligible for your insurance after you turn 50. If you had a kid at age 35, she'd be eligible until you're 62.
Here's the problem with that line of reasoning. If Paul's house burns down and he has no fire insurance on it, we would just say, "Too bad for Paul... he should have bought fire insurance."
But if Paul gets cancer and has no health insurance, very few of us would say "Too bad for Paul... I guess he's going to die."
People are not sympathetic with someone who makes a poor financial decision such as fire insurance. But most people are willing to pitch in to save someones life -- in the US they always have been. That is why all of our hospital systems began as charity hospitals.
Our problem for the last 45 years after allowing the government's nose under the tent of health care is that now it has become a massive bureaucracy that cares nothing about Paul's cancer. Paul is just another number to them, not a person who we would extend empathy to. The bureaucracy is incapable of empathy or of caring weather Paul lives or dies. He's just a cypher amidst a mass of paperwork to them.
We have managed to remove the human element of compassion from health care and made it a budgetary matter for faceless, and in fact heartless bureaucracies to handle and often corrupt and greedy 'health care providers' to deliver.
The "charity" and simple human empathy element of health care has been nearly totally removed from the equation. It is now big business thanks to government involvement.
Not good.
Well, Judge Heaton, you arguably can tell the owner of a going concern, even a privately held going concern, that the government can compel him to follow the HHS mandate. I think you’ll find it might be more difficult for you and HHS if the CEO of said concern says “Okay, we talked it over and we can’t in good conscience continue Hobby Lobby as a going concern with those laws in place. We’re closing all our facilities, terminating all our employees, basically winding up the company. We’ll help our employees find new work, and make sure they (and potential employers) understand we’re not doing this because they’re bad employees, but we’re also going to be very honest and open with them all about why we’re doing this. And laws and court decisions like these are exactly why we’re doing this. And then you people can deal with the financial and human consequences of 18,000 newly unemployed people, and decide whether you really like your laws that much.”
Actually, it was pulled out of the Heritage Foundation's well-traveled backside.
Very bad news. It’s interesting that they’re attacking the Protestant organizations first, even though there were only a couple of groups that opposed Bambicare. At the same time, the Catholic Church as a whole has said it’s not going to implement Bambicare (and has also filed suit), but the secularist forces don’t feel this is a good time to confront the bishops. Too bad for them, because our bishops get more conservative and more aggressive every day..
I think the government may be hoping to threaten smaller groups or even the friends of these groups enough to make them back off. Some of them will, some of them won’t. When they go after the Church (I’m betting by January), I think things will be a lot clearer for all people.
Go back to school because, in the case of Papa John's, having to charge/pay $0.14 more for a pizza will kill the economy. :rolleyes:
Paying in income-type tax would be much less burdensome to businesses than the current system of yearly negotiations with insurance companies and administering the insurance paperwork for their employees.
And it's not very liberating for the employee, because he can't reduce his costs by living as healthily as he can and opting for cheaper coverage to prevent catastrophic losses, such as a Major Medical plan or a Health Share plan, or no coverage it all. (The latter has heretofore been common for Americans who are in low-risk groups, e.g. young unmarried employed men ages 20 - 30, who choose to take that $nK a year and put it into something they want more, i.e. a business start-up.)(We call this "choice".)
Welcome to the burdens of living in a modern society. We make it mandatory here in Florida to purchase auto insurance to protect people from having to deal with paying for things out of pocket caused by uninsured motorists. Health coverage ought to work the same way, everybody pays in and it is there when you need it.
It also results in a sharp reduction in the number of providers, since doctors will get out of a system which micro-manages their professional and ethical judgments and triples their paperwork. Most potential medical students won't bust their butts to go through all those years of schooling, internship, residency, etc. just to be put in the shackles of a system "with all the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service and all the compassion of the IRS".
We're already undergoing a severe shortage of doctors and it's been happening since before the passage of Obamacare. It's caused by a population increasing faster than the medical schools can push out doctors. Fix the supply of doctors by building more medical colleges and making it so that becoming a doctor doesn't mean taking on crushing levels of student debt.
And who do you think is the largest funder of medical innovation and progress in the world? The US government funded National Institutes of Health to the tune of over $30bn annually.
Maybe it is time for you to move on to DU? Conflating religious freedom and conscience with racism and or bigotry is a leftist tactic.
YOU are a leftist!
And? It’s not like I’ve been trying to hide it.
You need to get deprogrammed -your mind is corrupted by leftist propaganda. YOU are one of Obama's useful idiots advocating for government imposed tyranny.
The Heritage Foundation may have had part of the idea, but it did not ram is idea down the collective throat of the nation in defiance of the people’s desire. The plan Heritage advanced had none of the complexity and intrusiveness of the current 2700-page law, which was thrown together in a few months by people who had no clinical experience whatsoever. Eventually, after some consideration and feedback, Heritage dropped the idea. Obama did not.
The ACA is an interesting piece of legislation. Have you read it? The entire thing? Do you have to work within its constraints? Are you familiar with the functioning and shortcomings of the hideous National Health Service of the UK? Do you have either medical research or clinical experience? I have. I submit that if you too could answer those questions in the affirmative, you’d have a more realistic idea of the effects of Obamacare, and of the single-payer system for which you long.
“If a corporation is a “person”, then why doesn’t it have religious freedom?”
Great question!
I’ll venture a guess, if I may: because it’s not consistent with the Marxist left’s agenda (21?) for America.
Hobby Lobby could cancel all insurance, pay the $2000 penalty, and know they didn’t buy insurance that covered birth control.
I can’t wait for a conservative president to require all businesses to reverently display posters of Jesus throughout their work environments. It would tak Congress to help, but it might not infringe, as long as no one had to do anything with it beyond displaying it.
Well we have been looking at a couple of Christian Schools. And College of the Ozarks seems interesting. Our local university doesn’t seem to bad or Sul Ross out in Alpine... I guess it will be a wait and see.
Thanks bro!
LLS
True but I gave my word to my employees and even if it costs me money... I must keep my word.
LLS
I guess that means muslims may not be allowed to run halal meat markets? or Bakeries? Hmmmm I have a feeling Obama will find a way to compromise with them.
Most muslims will sell anything in their store. They can sell but not use or prepare. They are not required by any law to sell or stock any particular product.
Insurance is a whole different ballgame. I'm sure your premiums pay for all kinds of stuff that is against religion but we can't really pick and choose how the money is spent once we send in our premiums. I don't thnik they can win this.
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