Now that the Supreme Court has decided to take up the contraceptive mandate in Obamacare, the question before it is whether corporations have religious rights. That just makes me laugh out loud, and would no doubt make Thomas Jefferson spin in his Monticello grave.
When, pray tell, did we all lose our minds?
The court, in case you missed the news, agreed to hear two cases challenging the birth control mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Each of these cases was brought by a secular, profit-making company seeking an exemption on religious grounds.
Recommended For You
I'll acknowledge that I'm no historian, nor am I an authority on the U.S. Constitution. But I paid attention in civics class (and I was a government affairs editor for a good while), so it sounds to me as if we need to sharpen our pencils and make much clearer that old line that's supposed to separate church and state.
I have another objection here that should resonate with everyone, regardless of their political persuasion. Who in their right mind, I'd like to know, would be happy having their employer in the bedroom?
This isn't about abortion rights, folks. It's about the proper role of government and business in our personal lives.
The lower-court judges who issued their idiotic decisions and forced the Supreme Court's hand, leaving it no choice but to agree to hear this ridiculous case, need a few remedial lessons in the basic tenets that our founding fathers rightly held so dear.
They also might want to stop and remind themselves that while corporations might, in fact, be made up of people, companies aren't, in actuality, people.
Corporations can't marry. They can't run for office. They can't even vote.
The issue of corporate personhood, we all remember, arose in the high court's abomination of a decision in Citizen's United, which held that the First Amendment's free speech clause meant unions and corporations should be able to engage fully in the political process. That, in turn, meant governments are restricted from limiting political spending by corporations. Ugh.
So, now, if the Supremes agree that corporations do, indeed, enjoy religious rights, we will have entered into a whole new looking-glass world.
In this world, companies could claim that their newly obtained freedom of religion protects them from all sorts of laws designed to protect people from, say, discrimination by employers.
Civil rights laws, of course, prohibit employers from firing people for practicing their religion or compelling you to practice theirs.
But if corporations are awarded religious rights, couldn't they challenge that? What about employers that no longer wish to recognize same-sex couples, despite the court's decision this year to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act?
Jefferson and those other guys back in the early days of this great nation included religious freedom in the Constitution because they felt no one, including the monarchs, should tell people how or who to worship.
Giving corporations religious rights gives power to the already-powerful, and that's just an invitation to disaster.
It might offend some, but even a first-year law student can see there's no "substantial burden" in PPACA's contraceptive mandate that meets the thresholds set under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
We all cherish our religion protections. The United States was not built on the notion of imposing religious views on those who do not share them.
I'm praying the high court does the right thing.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
