By Marie Price
The Daily Record Newswire
Some attorneys see the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby as a welcome recognition that companies owned by people with religious objections to abortion do not have to violate those beliefs because of a federal law requiring health coverage of certain contraceptives.
Others view the decision as a loss for employees and for gender equality.
Andrew Lester represented several members of Congress who filed amicus briefs supporting Hobby Lobby before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in the company’s favor.
Asked whether he thinks the court should have ruled more broadly for corporations, Lester said he believes the court acted correctly in issuing a decision covering only closely held corporations such as the one that owns the Hobby Lobby stores.
“The court does not find that the law is unconstitutional and does not find in favor of Hobby Lobby on constitutional grounds,” he said. “I’ve always thought this was a Religious Freedom Restoration Act case.”
Under RFRA, he said, the question was always whether the contraceptive mandate was the least-restrictive mandate of accomplishing the end that Congress was trying to reach.
“Frankly, it seems to me pretty straightforward that it was not the least-restrictive means,” Lester said. “I think the Supreme Court decided it very precisely and correctly on this narrow ground.”
He said the court’s decision will serve as a clear precedent for some of the dozens of other cases challenging the Affordable Care Act or other statutes.
“What the court has told us is that corporations do have rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to have a religious belief, and when they have a sincerely held religious belief, to have that belief accommodated as provided in the statute,” Lester said, acknowledging that that does not mean the person with such a belief will always win.
Brady Henderson, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma, said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent pokes at a key difficulty in the majority opinion.
“There is this fundamental problem that really does, for the first time, say that a for-profit company is something that’s there to exercise religion,” Henderson said.
“That’s something that I think Ginsburg is right in viewing as rather unprecedented.”
He said that problem brings up the related issue of whether the court’s conclusion waters down the religious rights of individuals, known in legal parlance as “natural persons.”
“I think the other is more from the perspective of particularly gender equality in the workplace and generally the labor rights or economic equality perspective,” Henderson said.
“It’s to say at what point has this created this potential for an employer or an owner in a powerful position financially over people to exert even more influence over the lives of others. Those are the two places where we have the most concern over the decision.”
Having said that, Henderson said the Hobby Lobby decision can be read with other recent opinions as having a common denominator: decisions that prohibit police from searching cellphones without cause; striking down a collective bargaining provision (the court held that Illinois could not require home health workers to pay dues to a labor organization); last week’s decision blocking the president’s interim appointments to the National Labor Relations Board; and another recent decision rejecting the idea of “buffer zones” around abortion clinics.
“In a sense, it’s saying to the government, ‘back off,’” he said. “They all have the common denominator of showing us a court that seems to be asserting itself much more in terms of maybe turning a tide a little bit. We’ve had Supreme Court terms for years now in which we’ve seen gradual expansion of government power, expansion of executive authority, in a sense shrinking of maybe a citizen’s own sphere of power and rights.”
The attorney said the ACLU is disappointed in the case’s outcome for employees, but it is not the broad-based victory for religious freedom that some are trying to claim it is. Mark Rienzi, senior counsel with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented Hobby Lobby, said, “Today’s decision is a big win for religious freedom in America.”
He said the court was clear in holding that the owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties, who also challenged the mandate, are protected by RFRA, and that the multimillion-dollar penalties they would shoulder had they not complied would be a substantial burden.
The justices also said the federal government has other options, such as paying for the challenged coverage itself.
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