Another stunning expansion of corporate rights: corps have right to religion

[Drew Phipps]

On top of free speech and unlimited political contributions, now corporations have the right to religion that excuse compliance with the law.

From news 6/30/14:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/30...d%3D495368

Supreme Court Rules In Hobby Lobby Case, Dealing Blow To Birth Control Coverage

A divided Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Monday that closely held corporations cannot be required to provide contraception coverage for their employees. In an opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Burwell that the Obama administration has failed to show that the contraception mandate contained in the Affordable Care Act is the "least restrictive means of advancing its interest" in providing birth control at no cost to women. "Any suggestion that for-profit corporations are incapable of exercising religion because their purpose is simply to make money flies in the face of modern corporate law," Alito wrote, adding that by requiring religious corporations to cover contraception, "the HHS mandate demands that they engage in conduct that seriously violates their religious beliefs."


The Affordable Care Act contains a provision requiring most employers to cover the full range of contraception in their health care plans at no cost to their female employees. The Obama administration had granted an exemption for churches and accommodations for religious hospitals, schools and nonprofits, but for-profit companies were required to comply with the coverage rule or pay fines. Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned craft supply chain store, and Conestoga Wood Specialties Store, a Pennsylvania wood manufacturer owned by a family of Mennonites, challenged the contraception mandate on the grounds that it violates their religious freedom by requiring them to pay for methods of contraception they find morally objectionable. The owners of those companies believe some forms of birth control -- emergency contraception and intrauterine devices -- are forms of abortion because they could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. Monday's opinion was written narrowly so as only to apply to the contraception mandate, not to religious employers who object to other medical services, like blood transfusions or vaccines.


Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and mostly joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer. Ginsburg warned in her dissent that the decision was not as narrow as it claimed to be. "In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs," Ginsburg wrote. Ginsburg argued that the government has a "compelling interest" in providing no-cost birth control to women. "Those interests are concrete, specific, and demonstrated by a wealth of empirical evidence," she wrote. "To recapitulate, the mandated contraception coverage enables women to avoid the health problems unintended pregnancies may visit on them and their children." At oral arguments in March, the women Supreme Court justices grilled Hobby Lobby's lawyer, former Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, about whether a for-profit company can be considered a religious organization, exempt from certain federal laws, if a majority of its employees hold different beliefs than the company's owners. Justices Sotomayor and Kagan asked whether companies like Hobby Lobby should be allowed to refuse to cover procedures like blood transfusions and vaccines, or to ask for exemptions to things like anti-discrimination and minimum wage laws, if they had religious objections to those policies. "Everything would be piecemeal, nothing would be uniform," Kagan warned.


But some of the court's conservative-leaning justices asked why the Obama administration had granted religious accommodations to any organizations if the contraception mandate was so critical to public health. "It must have been because the health care coverage was not that important," said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was generally considered to be the swing vote. In his concurring opinion, Kennedy said the decision "does not have the breadth and sweep ascribed to it by the respectful and powerful dissent." He said because there is already a mechanism in place to provide a religious accommodation to some organizations, adding another accommodation would not be a significant burden on the government.


"In these cases, it is the Court's understanding that an accommodation may be made to the employers without imposition of a whole new program or burden on the government," Kennedy wrote. "As the Court makes clear, this is not a case where it can be established that it is difficult to accommodate the government's interest, and in fact the mechanism for doing so is already in place. Ginsburg's dissent said that Congress had never intended to allow for-profit corporations to get religious-based exemptions, arguing that if it had, "a clarion statement to that effect likely would have been made in the legislation."


Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, called the decision a blow to women's reproductive health. "Today, the Supreme Court ruled against American women and families, giving bosses the right to discriminate against women and deny their employees access to birth control coverage," Richards said in a statement. "This is a deeply disappointing and troubling ruling that will prevent some women, especially those working hourly-wage jobs and struggling to make ends meet, from getting birth control."

(Emphasis added)

*****

Whether or not you agree with birth control, or Obamacare, you must agree that this is a startling and unwise precedent. I personally predict that by tomorrow, July 1, 2014, there will be a religion established that has as its centerpiece the worship of money, and important beliefs such as the unrestricted use of resources, the free pollution of the environment, the right to slavery of its employees, a jihad-like right to punish competitors, and the right to falsely advertise goods and services. I also foresee that it will become the richest religion on earth in a short period of time.

[Magda Hassan]

::face.palm::::headexplode::

[David Guyatt]

Corporations are now a protected species, able to do as they wish.

[Drew Phipps]

From news 7/2/14:

Notre Dame Enters the Minefield, Plus the Other Businesses Who Will Deny Contraceptive Care After Hobby Lobby

In her dissent on Monday's Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, "The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield." Seems like she was right. The Supreme Court's decision means that lower courts will apply the ruling to other similar cases, and there's no shortage of "closely-held corporations" that want to get out of Obamacare's contraceptive care mandate. Gretchen Borchelt, senior counsel and director of state reproductive health policy for the National Women's Law Center, told The Daily Beast, "Other closely held companies now have a license to harm their employees in the name of the company's religion. If companies qualify, they can use this decision to make the same claim."

A closely-held corporation is one with more than 50 percent of stock owned by five or fewer people. Within that constraint, the number of employees or annual revenue can vary greatly, Ginsburg noted in her dissent. Mars Inc., for example, has 70,000 employees and counts as a closely held company. As does Cargill, the largest private company in America. It makes more than $136 billion every year in revenue.

Spanning industries and varying in size, 50 for-profit companies and 59 non-profits have filed lawsuits against the ACA's contraception mandate. They range from boutique law firms to giant universities. Because Roman Catholic teaching bans most forms of contraception, the Catholic University of Notre Dame is one notable non-profit challenger. Famous for its Division I "Fighting Irish" athletic program, Notre Dame employs at least 5,590 people and boasts a $9 billion endowment.

[Drew Phipps]

From the Huffington Post by Ryan Grim 7/2/14

8 Other Laws That Could Be Ignored Now That Christians Get To Pick And Choose

The owners of a chain of stores called Hobby Lobby don't like Obamacare. In particular, they really don't like the part that requires insurance companies to cover contraceptives. Normally, people who don't like a law petition the government to change that law. That's how a nation of laws works.

But these men are Christians. The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Christian business owners are special. Their deeply held religious belief that some particular form of contraception is immoral carries more weight than the force of law, five conservative Christian justices ruled. The court -- in a fairly bald admission that its ruling is incoherent -- added that no general amnesty from other laws should be assumed to be the result of its ruling and that its reasoning was strictly limited to women's contraception. Such a limitation raises legitimate questions about the rather perverted and obsessive minds of the five men who made the ruling, but it also carries little legal weight. Precedent is precedent, whether the precedent-setters say so or not.

As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wondered aloud in her dissent, "Would the exemption ... extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah's Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus)?" As long as we're doing a la carte law-abiding, here are a few additional ones that could become optional to certain people with deeply held beliefs.

NUDITY LAWS
Entire colonies of people are dedicated to the belief that being compelled to wear clothes is wrong. Others don't believe they should be compelled to make love only indoors. Don't wanna see this on your Saturday stroll? Hey, freedom isn't free.

TAXES
Most religions profess a deep affinity for peace (while drenching history in blood in the name of religion, but whatever). Why should religious pacifists be compelled to pay taxes that subsidize war? Why should Randians, believers in Atlas Shrugged, the bible for dorm-room free-market evangelists, be forced to support the evil that is government?"

(interrupting quote: Taxpaying is specifically excluded from the Hobby ruling.)

"LSD
There isn't much more religious of an experience than talking directly with God. Hell, Huston Smith included a section on acid in his definitive book The World's Religions. While we're at it, all drug laws rub up against religious practice. Sorry officer, this is our church.

GROWING HEMP
If you've ever talked to a hemp evangelist, you know belief in the crop borders on the religious.

STONING
The Bible is packed with tales of impure women meeting a just end under a pile of stones. Today, in certain countries, they're known as honor killings. Will the court make an exception to murder for the deeply religious?

GENITAL MUTILATION
Female circumcision -- more commonly and accurately known as genital mutilation -- is central to the practice of some religions, according to some people who have strong beliefs. What is a democracy to tell people otherwise? In fact, the same could go for domestic violence, polygamy and whatever else.

PASTEURIZED MILK
For some Amish folk, following a strict religious interpretation of "Do unto others what you would have others do unto you" means selling raw, unpasteurized milk, a practice banned under U.S. law for its potential to carry dangerous bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
To hell with the Violence Against Women Act, when the Quran authorizes you to strike a disobedient wife, as illustrated in Chapter 4, Verse 34. And we don't have to limit the freedom to Muslim men. As Deuteronomy 25:11-12 testifies, "If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity."
(end quote)


I could add a few more: no coverage for those kiddie vaccinations, refusing to hire female employees at all unless it's for domestic work, refusing to hire gays or minorities, etc....

[Peter Lemkin]

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Reason #1 SCOTUS Will Regret Hobby Lobby

By Daily kos [/TD]
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Supreme Court
(image by katmeresin)

Reprinted from www.dailykos.com, by Man from Wasichustan

After oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, I wrote a very misnamed but widely read diary in which I echoed Attorney and Ring of Fire radio host Mike Papantonio's argument that the SCOTUS would never rule in favor of Hobby Lobby for a really Big Business reason: It pierces the corporate veil.
If Hobby Lobby's owners can give their Corporation religion, their religion gives Hobby Lobby's owners--and any other owner, shareholder, officer, whatever--liability for the actions of the corporation. Mr. Papantonio, who happens to be one of America's preeminent trial lawyers, sees it as an opportunity to sue owners for the company's negligence.
Some other people, it turns out, agree with his assessment and expand on what it means....

That separation is what legal and business scholars call the "corporate veil," and it's fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it's in question. By letting Hobby Lobby's owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.

So says Alex Park, writing in Salon today.

"If religious shareholders can do it, why can't creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?" Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.That's a question raised by 44 other law professors, who filed a friends-of-the-court brief that implored the Court to reject Hobby Lobby's argument and hold the veil in place. Here's what they argued:

Allowing a corporation, through either shareholder vote or board resolution, to take on and assert the religious beliefs of its shareholders in order to avoid having to comply with a generally-applicable law with a secular purpose is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept of incorporation. Creating such an unprecedented and idiosyncratic tear in the corporate veil would also carry with it unintended consequences, many of which are not easily foreseen.

This is definitely going to complicate things for the religious extremists on the SCOTUS and empire wide as these lawsuits inevitably proliferate. Putting on the popcorn....now.

[Peter Lemkin]

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On the Road to Theocracy: The Hobby Lobby Decision

By Steven Jonas

TheHobby Lobby decision has many implications. First, one must agreewith Justice Ginsburg thatregardless of Justices Alito's caveats, the tide unleashed by the decision ofthe Right-wing Five is not going to stop at the shoreline of the separation ofchurch and state any time soon. And for the long-range future of the UnitedStates, that is the most significant element of the decision. That is not to say that it also hashorrible outcomes for women and their sexual behavior, their private lives, andtheir private decision-making. As AndyBorowitz so cogently put it,"Supreme Court Majority Calls Case a Dispute between Women andPeople." Chiming in was everyone's favorite very-far-right GOP SenatorMike Lee of Utah who said that most women who use contraceptives do so for"recreational purposes." Likethat's supposed to make a difference on whether or not a public corporation candiscriminate against women on their choice of FDA approved contraceptives, onreligious grounds.[/TD]
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(By the way, most folks label Lee as a "TeaPartier," as if such types really differ from "regularRepublicans." Well, they do, but not on policy (except perhaps around theedges on immigration policy, which Eric Cantor found to his regret, at leastamong the 13% of eligible voters in his district who bothered to vote). If youlook closely, it is almost always just a matter of style and wording. )
There are a variety of other importantnegative aspects of this decision that are being widely and well dealt withfrom the Left. In my view, the most important one is how this decision ushersour one further, very big, step down the road to theocracy. For the SupremeCourt has held that in matters of legislation, law, and public programs, thereligious positions of one person (and of course they have recently reaffirmedthe original 1880s railroad-lawyers-Court decision that corporations are people(see "Citizens United"), can outweigh the religious position, or non-religiousbut ethical/moral position, of another.

Au musee de l'Oeuvre Notre-Dame : Nativite (Alsace-vers 1470). Let's all gather 'round --- whether you believe or not --- or suffer the consequences of the law.

For the purposes of this case, HobbyLobby claimed that its religious position on certain contraceptives and howthey act in the body, exempted them from being forced to cover thosemedications under the Affordable Care Act. That what the Hobby Lobby, awell-known politically active right-wing company was really after was the ACAwas revealed by the fact that they went along with coverage of those samecontraceptives when they provided private insurance for their employees beforethe passage of the ACA. But that's another matter. Also another matter is thatthe fact that they ascribed to certain contraceptives abortifacient functionsthat the science of their mode-of-action shows to be a falsity. But we knowwell that facts are never a concern to the Right when it is pursuing its ownpolitical and economic agenda. In this case much more importantly is thequestion of whether or not, in the sector of public programs one position onabortion itself should outweigh another. Again a matter for another time. Onecannot assume that women who use contraceptives have not considered thereligious implications of such use, for themselves, and have come to theconclusion that doing soon was compatible with their religious beliefs. Thesame reasoning of course applies to women who have abortions.
And so, what the Court has done here isto take one set of religious beliefs, that of the owners of a companyincorporated under public law (and gaining the tax benefits of so doing), andplaced them above the religious beliefs of their employees, all in the name ofreligious freedom. In pre-Enlightenment 16th and 17th century Europe, a timethat Justice Scalia has pined for in the past, Europeans of various countriesslaughtered each other over similar questions of opposing religious doctrines.Back then it wasn't over such matters as contraception (or even abortion,because Catholic doctrine, set down several hundred years previously by St.Thomas Aquinas, held that abortion was OK up until the "time ofquickening," 12-16 weeks). People were burned at the stake for, forexample, holding that the wine and the wafer offered at the end of servicesreally were, or were really just symbolic of, the blood and body of Christ.People slaughtered each other over whether it was predestination or "goodworks" that determined whether or not one went to heaven. And we, in theend, could have a civil war over, in part, the matter of whether my religiousview of the use of contraceptives is right and yours is wrong.
The Hobby Lobby decisions, as JusticeGinsburg implies (and please, I am not putting words in her mouth) opens up aPandora's box where endless litigation might be the least negative outcome. TheFirst Amendment the constitution says, in part: "Congress shall make nolaw respecting an establishment of religion, or pro hibiting the free exercisethereof;." This right-wing Republican Supreme Court, using its one-votemajority, has re-written that language. The Amendment now reads "Congressshall make no law that requires a person to comply with it if they claim areligious exemption, and the religious views of one group of citizens can beheld to outweigh those of another group, by law;."
Religion, according to this decision,now becomes a/the central determinant of public policy, should an electedgovernment choose to make it so and the Supreme Court of the time goes alongwith that interpretation of the Constitution. As I said at the outset of thiscolumn, "Hobby Lobby" has placed this nation firmly on the pathleading to the establishment of a Theocracy, that is a nation ruled byreligious law. There are already certain leading Republicans, like the likelyDominionists Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee, who would beperfectly fine with that idea.
Look out, folks. That train is hurtlingdown the track. Two current books that provide pictures of what such a realitymight look like are mine, "The15% Solution" and Fred Rich's masterful"ChristianNation." Of course the classic in thisgenre is Margaret Atwood's "AHandmaid's Tale." At the rate we are goingwith such political decisions such as Hobby Lobby (and this case, just like"Citizens United" and all of those other right-wing precedents set bythis court, is first and foremost a political one made by a set of Justices putinto place by right-wing Presidents just so that they could make decisions likethis one), unless some powerful forces organize to stop the process, we arewell on our way to becoming an authoritarian theocracy.

[Magda Hassan]

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For the purposes of this case, Hobby Lobby claimed that its religious position on certain contraceptives and how they act in the body, exempted them from being forced to cover those medications under the Affordable Care Act. That what the Hobby Lobby, a well-known politically active right-wing company was really after was the ACAwas revealed by the fact that they went along with coverage of those same contraceptives when they provided private insurance for their employees beforethe passage of the ACA.

That's what I had noted. Why now and why this?

[Magda Hassan]

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[TD="width: 84%"]Reason #1 SCOTUS Will Regret Hobby Lobby

By Daily kos
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Supreme Court
(image by katmeresin)

Reprinted from www.dailykos.com, by Man from Wasichustan

After oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, I wrote a very misnamed but widely read diary in which I echoed Attorney and Ring of Fire radio host Mike Papantonio's argument that the SCOTUS would never rule in favor of Hobby Lobby for a really Big Business reason: It pierces the corporate veil.
If Hobby Lobby's owners can give their Corporation religion, their religion gives Hobby Lobby's owners--and any other owner, shareholder, officer, whatever--liability for the actions of the corporation. Mr. Papantonio, who happens to be one of America's preeminent trial lawyers, sees it as an opportunity to sue owners for the company's negligence.
Some other people, it turns out, agree with his assessment and expand on what it means....

That separation is what legal and business scholars call the "corporate veil," and it's fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it's in question. By letting Hobby Lobby's owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.

So says Alex Park, writing in Salon today.

"If religious shareholders can do it, why can't creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?" Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.That's a question raised by 44 other law professors, who filed a friends-of-the-court brief that implored the Court to reject Hobby Lobby's argument and hold the veil in place. Here's what they argued:

Allowing a corporation, through either shareholder vote or board resolution, to take on and assert the religious beliefs of its shareholders in order to avoid having to comply with a generally-applicable law with a secular purpose is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept of incorporation. Creating such an unprecedented and idiosyncratic tear in the corporate veil would also carry with it unintended consequences, many of which are not easily foreseen.

This is definitely going to complicate things for the religious extremists on the SCOTUS and empire wide as these lawsuits inevitably proliferate. Putting on the popcorn....now.

Love it! Hoisted by their own petard!

[Peter Lemkin]

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[TD="width: 84%"]Reason #1 SCOTUS Will Regret Hobby Lobby

By Daily kos [/TD]
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[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Supreme Court
(image by katmeresin)

Reprinted from www.dailykos.com, by Man from Wasichustan

After oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, I wrote a very misnamed but widely read diary in which I echoed Attorney and Ring of Fire radio host Mike Papantonio's argument that the SCOTUS would never rule in favor of Hobby Lobby for a really Big Business reason: It pierces the corporate veil.
If Hobby Lobby's owners can give their Corporation religion, their religion gives Hobby Lobby's owners--and any other owner, shareholder, officer, whatever--liability for the actions of the corporation. Mr. Papantonio, who happens to be one of America's preeminent trial lawyers, sees it as an opportunity to sue owners for the company's negligence.
Some other people, it turns out, agree with his assessment and expand on what it means....

That separation is what legal and business scholars call the "corporate veil," and it's fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it's in question. By letting Hobby Lobby's owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.

So says Alex Park, writing in Salon today.

"If religious shareholders can do it, why can't creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?" Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.That's a question raised by 44 other law professors, who filed a friends-of-the-court brief that implored the Court to reject Hobby Lobby's argument and hold the veil in place. Here's what they argued:

Allowing a corporation, through either shareholder vote or board resolution, to take on and assert the religious beliefs of its shareholders in order to avoid having to comply with a generally-applicable law with a secular purpose is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept of incorporation. Creating such an unprecedented and idiosyncratic tear in the corporate veil would also carry with it unintended consequences, many of which are not easily foreseen.

This is definitely going to complicate things for the religious extremists on the SCOTUS and empire wide as these lawsuits inevitably proliferate. Putting on the popcorn....now.

Love it! Hoisted by their own petard!

While it is the only ray of light in the storm, and does give a new chance [in a fair legal system] to counterattack all corporations on MANY things; however, we still have the corporate-cloned Supreme Court to deal with. They do not follow law nor Constitution - they follow instructions from their Corporate and Political Masters of Big Money. My guess is this will open up more legal wins in the lower and Appeals Courts, than at the Supreme Court level - until and unless the structure of that court ever changes.