The Hobby Lobby ruling didn’t make sense to me for several reasons. One thing that really bothered me was the way they asserted they could apply the religious exemption law to the corporation: they started out asserting that corporations are persons, then shifted to saying the rights of persons are protected by protecting the rights of the people employed by corporations, then shifted to saying the shareholders would be burdened by the penalties if they didn’t comply with the healthcare law.
It felt very slippery, and didn’t seem to hang together. Then it dawned on me: what they’re saying is that shareholders should be allowed to practice their religion through the corporation. Which sounds good at first glance, and is certainly not unconstitutional. But I don’t believe it’s a good principle for a liberal society.
Think of a Muslim-held company that decides to force its employees to pray while facing toward Mecca five times a day, or a Rastafarian company that expects employees to smoke ganja. Or worse, a company owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses that refuses to pay for health coverage that includes my kid’s vaccines, or my blood transfusion during an emergency surgery, or my mother’s kidney transplant. According to the logic behind the Hobby Lobby ruling, this would just be the owners practicing their religion through the corporation. Never mind that they would be pushing their religion onto their employees.
I don’t think anyone should have the power to force a religious practice on someone else - not my teachers, not my city council, and certainly not my boss.
I shouldn’t need to worry about my employer’s religion when applying for a job, anymore than they should have to worry about mine. When you enter the public sphere, you check your religious baggage at the door. It may be uncomfortable, you may not like it, but it’s necessary in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society like ours.
If you don’t check your religion at the door, you can end up with Christian businesses and Muslim businesses and Atheist businesses, everything split along sectarian lines, like in Iraq. That’s not the kind of society I want to have.
In the past, our laws have been used to avoid precisely that kind of sectarian society. When Amish employers sued to be exempt from taking their employees' Social Security payments out of their wages, they lost, because you can’t exercise your religion through a corporate body. When shop owners in the South sued to be exempt from Fair Hiring laws, they lost, because when you enter the public sphere, you agree to be bound by the laws of that sphere.
By going against that precedent, the Hobby Lobby ruling undermines one of the core principles of our pluralistic society. I can only hope it gets overturned as soon as possible.
