Today, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case
against Obamacare’s contraception mandate, which requires employers
to provide health coverage for birth control or pay a fine. Two
closely held corporations with religious owners—hobby supply chain
Hobby Lobby and Mennonite-owned furniture maker Conestoga Wood
Specialties—are challenging the rule as a violation of religious
freedom.
Because the rule is directed at businesses and the challengers
are religious owners of businesses, the case has sometimes been
framed as a test of the limits of corporate personhood: Do
corporate entities have the same rights to religious freedom as
individuals?
The Supreme Court may end up
deciding on those lines. But it doesn’t necessarily have to. In
an amicus brief siding with the challengers, the Cato Institute
has argued that, while it’s certainly interesting to wonder about
whether corporate entities have the same religious freedoms as
individuals, it’s beside the point.
The issue isn’t whether the requirement places a burden on the
corporation, as an entity. Instead, Cato’s brief, which was
coauthored by senior fellow Ilya Shapiro, argues that the question
is whether the contraception mandate places an illegal burden on
the religious freedom of the individuals who own those
corporations.
The government’s argument is that because corporations are
distinct legal entities from their owners, they should be judged
separately and differently, as corporate bodies rather than as
individuals with traditional individual religious freedoms.
Basically, the owners might be religious, but the corporation
isn’t, and couldn’t be.
But both Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood are closely held,
family-run businesses. What that means is that any requirement for
corporate action is also a requirement for individual
action. The corporation may be legally distinct in some ways, but
it can’t do anything without at least one person—one
individual—making a decision to do it. And in the case of Hobby
Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties, those particular people
clearly have deeply held religious convictions.
Those convictions don’t disappear when making business
decisions. As Cato’s brief says, “those individuals do not check
their religious values at the door.” Those people should have the
freedom to conduct their personal and work lives in a way that
reflects their own deeply and sincerely held religious beliefs.
When the government compels a business to do something, it’s
compelling individuals to do something as well.
In this understanding, it simply doesn’t matter whether a
corporation is legally entitled to religious freedoms. It only
matters whether individuals do, and whether those individuals have
the right to conduct workplace affairs in accordance with personal
religious beliefs. And to believe that, you basically have to
believe that free exercise protections for religious practice don’t
extend to the workplace.
This isn’t the only useful or interesting argument for the
challengers. (The Reason Foundation, which publishes
Reason magazine and reason.com, signed onto a jointly
authored brief strongly defending
the legal concept of corporate personhood.) But it’s a useful,
and to my mind, reasonably compelling one, especially because of
the way it counters the conventional framing. It’s also one that
may end up influencing the final ruling: According to The Wall
Street Journal’s live blog of this morning’s oral arguments,
Chief Justice Roberts
suggested this morning that a narrow ruling, limited to closely
held corporations, could resolve the issue with minimal
friction.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1jrmjLm
via IFTTT