So now I’m trying to work my way back through the history of RFRA, to try to figure out why it had so much support, from the left as well as the right.

The ACLU has a relevant article on its site…but it has no date, which is very unhelpful. But for what it’s worth…

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right that is guaranteed by the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment clauses.[1] It encompasses not only the right to believe (or not to believe), but also the right to express and to manifest religious beliefs. These rights are fundamental and should not be subject to political process and majority votes. Thus the ACLU, along with almost every religious and civil rights group in America that has taken a position on the subject, rejects the Supreme Court’s notorious decision of Employment Division v. Smith. In Smith, Justice Scalia wrote that the accommodation of religion should be left “to the political process” where government officials and political majorities may abridge the rights of free exercise of religion.[2]

That’s just way too broad – that “but also the right to express and to manifest religious beliefs.” It’s just not true that there’s a sweeping general right to express and to manifest religious beliefs no matter what – it’s a conditional right that can be trumped by more basic rights. Some – indeed many – religious beliefs justify or mandate murder, torture, inequality before the law, subordination of women, genocide, you name it. In the US religious beliefs mandate the forced marriage of underage girls to men decades older; they mandate refusal to get medical treatment for children with treatable diseases; they mandate female subordination; they mandate refusal to vaccinate children.

So, weird city, on this one I agree with Scalia and disagree with the ACLU – but a lot of people are in that position, especially now in the wake of Hobby Lobby. Scalia himself has notoriously shifted.

The note under [2]:

[2] Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 890 (1990). The majority opinion was written by Justice Scalia and joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and by justices White, Stevens, and Kennedy. The Court held that a neutral law of general applicability may constitutionally result in incidental restrictions on free exercise where there was no contention that the government intended to target religious activity with the law. (The ACLU filed an amicus brief before the Court arguing that the free-exercise right should prevail.) The national opposition to the Smith case and its reasoning was overwhelming. The ACLU joined with a broad coalition of religious and civil liberties groups, including People for the American Way, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptists’ Ethics Religious Liberty Commission, and by many other groups to urge Congress to reinstitute the rule that religious freedom could be constrained solely if the government had a “compelling interest” in doing so. The Congress agreed overwhelmingly with the ACLU’s position (that was rejected by Justices Scalia, Rehnquist, White, Stevens and Kennedy), and adopted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 unanimously in the House and by a vote of 97-3 in the Senate.

Bad move.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

You know how team sports is the source of all virtue? Not so much.

Conor Friedersdorf talking to New York Times religion reporter Mark Oppenheimer

I was particularly intrigued by your article about Christians who play football–how they reconcile their faith, with its emphasis on humility and turning the other cheek, with their sport, where hitting opponents as hard as one can, to the point of trying to hurt them, is the norm. How was that article received in our football loving culture? Did any of the feedback help you to better understand the phenomenon?

That’s actually an article where my initial suspicions were only confirmed and amplified by my reporting. Football lovers like to think that team sports, and football in particular, promote virtue for those who play them. It’s clear the opposite is true. The research shows that participation in high-level athletics makes one less moral, more interested just in winning. And my interviews with Christian coaches were horrifying: they all justify to themselves all kinds of violence on the field, as well as dishonesty. Take an issue like lying to a referee: “Yes, I made that catch! I didn’t drop the ball!” Now, you’d think a “Christian” player would put some premium on telling the truth. But they all rationalize lying, in part because everyone does it. As if God’s rules can take a back seat to the custom of the sport.

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Washington Post gives its (as it were corporate) view of the Hobby Lobby ruling and what it implies.

When business owners enter the public marketplace, they should expect to follow laws with which they might disagree, on religious or other grounds. This is particularly true when they form corporations, to which the government offers unique benefits unavailable to individuals.

The Supreme Court weakened that principle Monday. Congress should revitalize it.

That’s one good way of putting it. The public marketplace, like most public places, is fundamentally secular. Gods don’t need commerce or trade, because they don’t need goods and services, because they don’t need anything, because they’re gods. We need them, we humans, who live here in the secular world. That’s one reason we need secular laws and secular agreements and contracts and habits.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act muddied these waters.

If this is the sort of balancing that the Supreme Court will conduct, Congress should change the law. The Constitution generally does not require religious exceptions to generally applicable laws. The ruling relied on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that does not mention corporations and that lawmakers could easily narrow. They should not only guarantee contraception coverage but also repair the federal government’s ability to provide for wholly legitimate common goods such as public health and marketplace regulation.

Catholic bishops already interfere with a hefty percentage of US health care via all the Catholic-owned hospitals and networks of hospitals. Bishops and church doctrine should have no role in public health at all.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by the philosophical primate on The American Humanist Association comments.

I wish people would quit talking about this case in terms of “corporate rights” and “corporate personhood” and the like. That’s a red herring. The decision prominently mentions the legal relevance of the fact that Hobby Lobby (and the other plaintiffs) are “closely held corporations” — that is, owned by a small number of shareholders rather than being publicly traded companies — and the decision was rationalized (I won’t dignify it with the word “justified”) on the basis that it protects the religious liberty OF THOSE INDIVIDUAL PERSONS. Yes, those persons own a company, but the rights at stake were the rights of the owners as persons, and religious rights were not in any way imputed to any corporation.

Here’s how the Hobby Lobby case reasoning works: The owners of Hobby Lobby claim, based on the language of the (misleadingly named, unnecessary, and poorly written) Religious Freedom Restoration Act, that the ACA’s requirement that all employers (above a certain size) pay some of the costs of comprehensive health coverage “substantially burdens” their religious liberty. How, exactly? Because comprehensive health insurance coverage includes contraception, and they don’t like contraception — because religion.

Now surely the owners of Hobby Lobby et al have a right to that religious opinion as individual people, and I’ll readily grant that the government would be unduly burdening their religious liberty if it were forcing them to use or purchase contraception. But it’s not quite so obvious that there is any encroachment on religious liberty in forcing them to pay for comprehensive health coverage for their employees. In fact, it’s the opposite of obvious. It’s downright obscure why anyone would think so.

How is paying for their employees’ insurance coverage — which employees may or may not use to acquire contraception — any different from paying their employees’ salaries, which employees also may or may not use to acquire contraception (or any of a number of other things that their employers might find disagreeable for religious reasons)? Yes, there is a purely practical difference that contraception can be expensive, but surely there is no difference in principle. To claim that a burden has been imposed on one’s liberty logically requires that one actually has some genuine right at stake — and employers have no legal or moral right to restrict, coerce, or influence in any way the private medical decisions of their employees any more than they have a right to tell their employees how to spend their paychecks. The claim that the employers in this case have any religious liberty that is being burdened in any way, “substantial” or not, is flatly ludicrous. (But, I repeat, that claim is not based on any notion that corporations as legal persons now have religious freedom to go along with their (mistakenly, foolishly, unjustifiably granted) freedom of speech.)

If anything, the religious liberty of *employees* is very substantially burdened by this decision, because it allows employers to arbitrarily limit employees’ access to health care and thereby impose their own private religious convictions on employees who may not (and probably do not) share them. But the primary burden here is on employees’ right to equality before the law: All people employed at companies above a certain size have a right to an employer-subsidized comprehensive insurance plan under the ACA — except now they don’t, if they have the misfortune of being employed by a privately-owned company whose owners claim they have a religious aversion to some perfectly ordinary health care option which comprehensive insurance plans are required to provide by law. This result is discriminatory on the face of it, even without the additional discrimination that MEN’S health care never seems to be an issue for anyone’s religious convictions.

For my part, I’m convinced that any time religious liberty clashes with equality before the law, the latter is a more fundamental moral and constitutional principle that ought to prevail. (Exceptions welcome, but I can’t think of any. And this is really why I think the RFRA is constitutionally unsound law, because it subordinates other constitutionally-guaranteed liberties to religious liberty.) But never mind that, because there is no plausible argument to be made that the comprehensive insurance coverage requirement of the ACA (which includes contraception, simply because it IS basic health care) imposes a “substantial burden” on the religious liberty of employers: Employers simply do not have any right — based in religious liberty or any other constitutional or legal principle — to make health care decisions (or any other personal or financial decisions) for their employees, so that right cannot be encroached on by the ACA or any other law.

So why did the five-MAN majority of the SCOTUS offer downright silly legal rationalizations in support of the rationally and legally insupportable claim that employers have some religious liberty that is substantially burdened by being required to provide comprehensive insurance coverage (including icky, icky contraceptive care) to employees? Because five white Catholic men are ideologically predisposed to dislike women in general and contraception in particular. And because those same men are willing tools of the plutocracy who always show a clear preference for expanding the power of employers over the protecting the rights of employees.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Haha don’t worry. The pope may present himself as some kind of lovable guy who just happened to bumble his kindly way up the hierarchy of an evil institution, but don’t worry, he’s still a patronizing clueless eyes-closed asshole about women. Whew, what a relief, right? He’s normal, and he won’t be giving all the expensive real estate away to some poor people.

The pope said women were “the most beautiful thing God has made”. And he added: “Theology cannot be done without this feminine touch.”

He agreed not enough was said about women and promised that steps were being taken to remedy the situation.

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Soraya has commentary at Time magazine.

In the practice of many religions, girls’ and women’s relationship to the divine are mediated, in strictly binary terms, by men: their speech, their ways of being and their judgments. Women’s behavior, especially sexual, is policed in ways that consolidate male power. It is impossible to be, in this particular case, a conservative Christian, without accepting and perpetuating the subordination of women to male rule. It is also blatant in “official” Catholicism, Mormonism, Evangelical Protestantism, Orthodox Judaism and Islam.

The fundamental psychology of these ideas, of religious male governance, does not exist in a silo, isolated from family structures, public life or political organization.

It certainly does not exist separately from our Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia, for example, makes no bones about his conscientious commitment to conservative Catholic ideals in his personal life and the seriousness of their impact on his work as a judge. There are many Catholics who reject these views, but he is not among them. These beliefs include those having to do with non-procreational sex, women’s roles, reproduction, sexuality, birth control and abortion. The fact that Scalia may be brilliant, and may have convinced himself that his opinions are a matter of reason and not faith, is irrelevant.

What is not irrelevant is that we are supposed to hold in abeyance any substantive concerns about the role that these beliefs, and their expression in our law, play in the distribution of justice and rights. They are centrally and critically important to women’s freedom, and we ignore this fact at our continued peril.

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The legal staff at American Atheists is doing a live ask questions thing about the Hobby Lobby ruling in 50 minutes from now, 7 pm Eastern time, 4 my time, midnight UK time.

Update: here is the video link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W25-WjDLuKY

I know what I want to ask. On p 3 of the Hobby Lobby ruling we are told that the purpose of granting rights to corporations is to protect the rights of people associated with the corporation, including shareholders, officers and employees. What’s to prevent a group of shareholders and/or employees from counter-suing to seek protection for *their* rights?

Why do the putative rights of the owners of Hobby Lobby get to trump the rights of all those other people? There’s bound to be a cacophony of religious beliefs in play, including zero religious beliefs; what can be the rationale for protecting some at the expense of all the others?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A survivor of one of the Magdalene laundries a Canadian home for single mothers in the 1970s left a comment in a Facebook group for such survivors yesterday. It froze my blood, and I asked the author if I could post it on my blog, with or without her name. She said yes just now, with no name (so I’m not linking, either).

I suppose this is one of those times when I should include a trigger warning. This is a horrible story.

In the home that I was in, me and another unwed mother (both of us were 8 months gone) were forced to deliver a dead deformed baby of another of the mothers there. This was done to punish all of us. The hospital had sent this poor girl back to the home to deliver the dead baby. The staff locked themselves in the office and refused to help. This poor girl should have been in hospital but as the hospital knew her baby was dead inside of her (it appears that it was Anencephaly), they didn’t care. She was 7 months gone. I sometimes still have nightmares about that. The office staff didn’t even come out when the ambulance arrived (not sure who called them but glad someone did).

1 Corinthians 13, anyone? Caritas?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The AHA press release:

“The Supreme Court has placed the religious views of corporate shareholders over the legitimate health care concerns of employees,” said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association. “This isn’t religious liberty—it’s religious intrusion that will negatively affect many hard-working Americans.”

By privileging the religious views of corporate owners, the ruling places a substantial burden on women who wish to obtain birth control methods, such as the IUD or morning after pill, the costs of which can be as high as $1,000 annually. The ruling may also spur other for-profit corporations to deny employees access to certain medical procedures, based on their owners’ personal creeds.

“The Supreme Court is endangering the health care of many Americans based on the fictitious idea that a corporation has religious convictions,” said David Niose, legal director of the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center. “By expanding the rights of corporations, this court is in fact contracting the rights of hard-working Americans who expect full health care coverage as required by law. ”

In January, the American Humanist Association, with other secular and humanist organizations, signed on to an amicus curiae brief in support of the government that argued a ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Via the always useful Cornell Legal Information Institute.

(a) In general
Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, except as provided in subsection (b) of this section.
(b) Exception
Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person—
(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and
(2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

(c) Judicial relief
A person whose religious exercise has been burdened in violation of this section may assert that violation as a claim or defense in a judicial proceeding and obtain appropriate relief against a government. Standing to assert a claim or defense under this section shall be governed by the general rules of standing under article III of the Constitution.

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Freedom From Religion Foundation suggests repealing the god damn RFRA (the swear is mine).

Today, in a heated 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court held that for-profit corporations can exercise their so-called religious conscience in order to restrict employees’ access to contraceptives. The ruling in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., absurdly holds that the contraceptive coverage granted by the Affordable Care Act creates a “significant burden” on a corporation’s free exercise of religion.

How could this be? This Alice in Wonderland ruling is based not on the Constitution, but on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a statute. This statute was adopted by Congress and must be repealed by Congress.

The main justification for this decision is the Supreme Court’s holding that RFRA protects Hobby Lobby from the generally applicable rules of the Affordable Care Act.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s amicus brief by noted state-church attorney Marci A. Hamilton (joined by groups advocating for the rights of victims of religious abuse), was the only brief before the Supreme Court that argued that RFRA is unconstitutional. Our important brief points out that RFRA “accords religious believers extreme religious liberty rights that yield a political and fiscal windfall in violation of the clearest commands of the Establishment Clause.”

A public outcry is in order. FFRF needs your help to tell Congress that RFRA is a bad law that must be repealed.

I would love to see that happen. But…the chances, any time within the next century or so? Barely visible.

Today’s decision is both dangerous and unprecedented. During oral arguments, counsel for the government, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, noted that a decision in favor of Hobby Lobby would be “the first time under the Free Exercise Clause or under RFRA in which [the Supreme Court] or any court has held that an employer . . . may be granted an exemption that extinguishes statutorily guaranteed benefits of fundamental importance.”

Today’s ruling ignored the rights and needs of thousands of female Hobby Lobby employees, and millions of women nationwide who work at for-profit corporations. Women workers must not be at the mercy of employers who happen to be religious fanatics who want to intrude into private reproductive decisions that are none of their business. Rather than protecting women workers’ right to health care and women’s freedom of conscience, the Court has turned its back on them in the name of “religious liberty.” This is untenable.

This damaging decision opens the floodgates for corporations, interested only in increasing their bottom line, to claim religious objections to a variety of generally applicable laws. The Court arbitrarily claims its decision would not necessarily allow a corporation to claim a similar religious objection to blood transfusions, vaccines, or mental health services, or create a religious right to discriminate on the basis of sex, sexual orientation or race. But very obviously, the ruling creates mischievous precedent that will haunt the next generation of litigation.

In other words the ruling is a kind of wedge to create an opening for theocracy. It’s just a nightmare.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The press release from Cranford.

“This is a disgrace and an indignity to Americans’ right to be protected from the abuses of other people’s religions,” said American Atheists President David Silverman. “Shame on the Supreme Court, which has effectively told Americans that if you can come up with a religious excuse, you are above the law. This is an injustice of the highest order for separation of religion and government, for equality, and for the constitutional protections guaranteed to all Americans.”

“The Court has granted religious liberties to some corporations, claiming they have the same rights as citizens. What about the rights of the women, the workers? We fear the consequences of this decision on publicly traded corporations in the future,” said Managing Director Amanda Knief, a lawyer and public policy expert.

Click here to read the full ruling in PDF form.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Americans United for Separation of Church and State also has a press release.

The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the owners of some secular, for-profit companies to deny their employees access to birth control is a blow to individual conscience and medical privacy rights, says Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“This decision is a double-edged disaster,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “It conjures up fake religious freedom rights for corporations while being blind to the importance of birth control to America’s working women.”

Added Lynn, “The justices have set a dangerous precedent. While the Obama administration may arrange for the government to provide contraceptives, a future administration could easily take that away. In years to come, many women may find their access to birth control hanging by a thread.”

Americans United filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the cases (Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius) on behalf of diverse faith communities, arguing that the owners of secular corporations are not entitled to a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s so-called “contraception mandate.” Hobby Lobby and Conestoga both cited the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), legislation signed into law in 1993, in their defense.

The AU brief noted that many people have different religious beliefs about contraception than their employers and explained that if the plaintiffs prevailed, “employees would find it more difficult to make personal decisions about healthcare and contraception in accordance with their own consciences.”

“We are a country of great religious diversity, and American workers must be able to make their own medical, family and reproductive decisions according to their own moral and religious values,” said Gregory M. Lipper, Americans United’s senior litigation counsel and a primary author of the brief. “The high court is out of step with the reality of American society.”

In addition to Lipper, the brief was authored by Americans United Legal Director Ayesha N. Khan and Madison Fellow Caitlin E. O’Connell.

The ruling is bad even for religious believers – for the same reason separation of church and state was seen as necessary at the beginning of this country: even religious believers don’t all believe exactly the same thing (to put it mildly), so it’s better not to impose any one sect’s beliefs on everyone; studied neutrality is the only solution.

Pope Alito clearly doesn’t agree.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

CFI has a press release.

Center for Inquiry Warns Hobby Lobby Decision Will Prove Deeply Damaging to American Health Care

Secular advocacy group the Center for Inquiry decried the Supreme Court’s ruling today that the health and welfare of female employees should be subordinated to their employers’ religious beliefs, and warned that the impact of the decision will prove deeply damaging to Americans’ access to health care, well beyond the scope of contraception coverage.

In a split decision, and over a vigorous dissent authored by Justice Ginsburg, the Court held that privately owned for-profit businesses are entitled to exemptions from the Contraceptive Mandate of the Affordable Care Act if their owners claim a religious basis for opposing contraception. As a result, employers with religious objections can deny employees access to insurance covering prescription contraception without co-pay. The Supreme Court based its decision on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which provides that a law that burdens a person’s religious beliefs must be justified by a compelling government interest. Today the Court made clear it does not view Americans’ access to medically necessary health care as a compelling government interest, and announced loud and clear that the religious preferences of employers take preference over the health needs of workers.

God I hate the RFRA. I remember raging (yes I’m a rage-blogger and was a rage-blogger before there were blogs) when it was passed.

In making its decision, the Supreme Court also made a determination that will cause significant confusion in church-state litigation for years to come. The majority held that small, closely held, for-profit private corporations have standing to sue under RFRA – in other words, that such corporations have the religious beliefs of their owners, and the same right to free exercise as their owners.

“The potential effects of this decision are absolutely chilling, setting a precedent that is sure to reverberate far beyond the issue of contraceptive coverage,” said Ronald A. Lindsay, President and CEO of the Center for Inquiry.

“This is not a decision that advances religious freedom – it is a decision that enshrines religious privilege over and above employee well-being,” added Lindsay. “This decision defies common sense, lacks compassion, and has the potential to harm us all.”

Is “closely held” a term of art?*

CFI previously filed an amicus brief in this case, and this month launched a major campaign to combat religion and junk science in health care policy (SafeandSecular.org). In the coming months and years, CFI will continue to work through lobbying, litigation, and grassroots action to mitigate the negative effects of this decision.

And mitigation is the best that can be hoped for, for the foreseeable future. It’s just disgusting.

*Update: Nick Fish tells me it means 50% of corporation held by 5 people or fewer.

Jim Lippard provides an IRS link.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

CNN reports:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that closely held companies cannot be required to pay to cover some types of contraceptives for their employees, ending its term with a narrow legal and political setback for a controversial part of President Barack Obama’s health care reform law.

In a 5-4 decision, the high court’s conservatives essentially ruled that some for-profit corporations have religious rights.

As if corporations were people, with rights, which they’re not.

The issue before the justices was whether Obamacare could mandate contraception coverage specifically for certain businesses that object for religious reasons.

“This case isn’t that practically important, except for the employees and businesses involved. There just aren’t a huge number of those,” said Thomas Goldstein, publisher of SCOTUSblog.com and a Washington appellate attorney.

“But everyone can agree the social questions presented — about when people can follow their religious convictions, and when people are entitled to contraception care — are truly important,” he said.

Read the ruling (.PDF)

Yes, the questions about “when people can follow their religious convictions” in such a way as to deny rights to their employees and/or customers are truly important.

he specific question presented was whether these companies can refuse, on the sincere claim it would violate their owners’ long-established moral beliefs.

The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

“How does a corporation exercise religion?” asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor at March’s oral arguments, summarizing perhaps the key constitutional question at hand.

“This is a religious question and it’s a moral question,” added Justice Samuel Alito, suggesting the businesses have such a right. “You want us to provide a definitive secular answer.”

A secular answer, at least, for sure. (Pretending corporations are people and have rights is a quasi-religious sort of belief, if you ask me, given the obviousness of the difference between corporations and people.)

Supporters of the law fear a high court setback on the contraception mandate will lead to other healthcare challenges on religion grounds, such as do-not-resuscitate orders and vaccine coverage. More broadly, many worry giving corporations religious freedom rights could affect laws on employment, safety, and civil rights.

The possibilities are endless, and utterly revolting.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)