Narrow, Religious & Business Exemptions?

By  Gary Berg-Cross

In its Hobby Lobby case decision the supremely, un-supreme court approved (rammed down our throat?) yet again another religious exemptions….for business.  It is yet another activist judge fallout from a Clinton era, federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act  (RFRA) passed by Congress to “protect individuals' religious freedoms.”  OK you have to now

translate “individual” to “company boss’s” (with firm religious beliefs).  And it’s supposedly just for contraception, that special religious sensitive area of human life.  It’s a religious liberty according to Justice Alito who saw boss liberty as in danger. Bosses with religious convictions, it seems to some, are under siege and feeling less free. They need some protection from this big, insensitive, secular government that is intruding on their exercise of belief. 

One may ask about the protection of employees, but this intrusion and harm seemed not to trouble Alito. His position seems to be something like “side effects are NOT going to happen if I say they won't happen.” There’ no explanation beyond that. No more reasoning about why this doesn’t open a door to something more. Justice Ginzburg could see some likely downside:

 

"The exemption sought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would…deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs access to contraceptive coverage"

And she offered some rationale why the ruling seems unreasonable:

"Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community."

 

On the potential slippery slope we have quickly learned that “Other corporations are going to jump in and take advantage of this I assume and say, ‘well wait a minute, our corporation doesn’t like this or our fundamental founders of our corporation doesn’t like that.’  Based on that, we should be able to opt out of provisions of Obamacare also and get away from that for our employees,” Analyst Greg Skordas

As widely noted this ruling was dressed up as one of those narrow decisions, but it seems to me more like another camel’s business-and-religion-friendly nose under the secular tent.  The rulings words say that it applies only to closely held private or companies whose owners have “deeply held” religious objections to certain forms of contraception. How narrow is that? It depends on understanding terms like closely held.  How many of US companies might fall into this category?  Well mom and pops qualify, but so might a company employing 10,000 people if held by a family of 5. One notes that Hobby Lobby itself has 600 stores with about 30,000 employees. They aren’t the biggest either.  Mars Inc., the family-owned candy giant, takes in $33 billion in revenues and has about 72,000 employees. Closely held Cargill Inc. takes in more than $136 billion in revenue and has about 140,000 employees. Indeed, roughly 90% of all companies in the U.S. are closely held, according to a 2000 study by the Copenhagen Business School. And they account for up to 50% of business. So there is a sneaky scope here despite what it is called.  What’s going on?

 

We've seen this type of opening before, although people have a short memory, the current problem has a long history. The spate of court decisions seems like part of incremental trend to slowing, but actively turn laws in a very business and religious faith friendly direction.  Certainly is friendly to those who are anti-choice. As Vox noted “since 2010, states have moved aggressively to restrict access to abortion and taken new steps to defund family planning programs.“ The wave of changes seems unprecedented and some see its roots in an:

unholy alliance of conservative greed, reactionary politicians and oppressive religious fanatics, which has a pinnacle of power in the Supreme Court, ‘

The core of conservative justices we have now seem more like a gaggle of politicians in judicial clothing that have slumped into shallower and shallower thinking in the service of some growing solstice of ideology.

One way of understanding this trend and its Supreme Court connection is to go back to lobbyist

& Nixon appointed justice Lewis F. Powell (see an earlier blog on Powell and Corporate Blueprints). This is a pre-Bork time but some of the politicization & hidden agendas we see in the court today goes back to Powell’s detailed plan, formalized in a secret 8 pg. memo entitled “Attack of American Free Enterprise System.” This was written to activate and engage the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The message then was familiar now, “become more aggressive in molding politics and law in the US.”  This is the aggression we see in increasingly polarized & politicized elements of our society. The consensus view is that the Powell memo, together with efforts by other proto-neocons, like Jewish Conservative Irving Kristol, united Chamber-types, reactionaries and Wall Street plutocrats crystallized an ideological vision that was emerging in early neocon circles. With this type of money and well placed backers the result established a opaque cabal of right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Accuracy in Academe, and Fox News. They in turn provided the ideological seeds, political cover & groundwork for these religio-corporatist movements that this type of Supreme Court grows out of. They can all be traced directly to subversive spirit & full-spectrum methods outlined in the Powell blueprint manifesto against progressive values, secularism, & the American left.

So in June, 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that, under RFRA, corporations counting as people - their sincere religious belief that “life begins at conception" also get protection.

In other words “Freedom for Bosses' Religious Beliefs.” We have to stay tuned and alert. Sincerely secularly but also politically-astutely alert.

Freedom from Religio-Politics

By Gary Berg-Cross

The recent dust up on Arizona’s SB 1062 provides some opportunity to discuss the idea Freedom and the phrase Freedom of Religion. But of course in most circles this isn't an intellectual opportunity as much as one framed by political and ideological differences that generate mind-numbing emotions. There is obviously a long history and associated philosophy to these terms, but increasingly there is political and legal context to them.  Conversations quickly get a bit complex and discussion gets muddled as we jump from a word sense to the history of the concept (The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson) to a philosophical perspective and then to an ensnaring political view.

As reported early in the debate SB 1062   expands Arizona's earlier (1999) "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" (RFRA). That law was applied with this idea of Religious Freedom - when the "victim" of religious discrimination is either an individual, a religious assembly or a religious institution. SB 1062 would have added businesses to the list of “victims” and thus to its “protection”. But what was really allowed by the law? Sure we heard loud claims of religious rights violation when a restaurant refused to serve a gay man, and was then sued for discrimination by the man. Under existing RFRA law they could be sued. Under SB 1062, they could not. 

The arguments was that this right to refuse service is a religious freedom. But other’s point out that “Religion” is what you BELIEVE not what you impose on other people. You are free to believe in all sorts of things, but a person's religious belief,s which may be tribal and certainly emotion-laden, stop at the boundary of the next person. My beliefs should not impose a burden on others.  And they should not be imposed in the secular marketplace for society’s transactions take place.  They can be practiced in Mosques, Temples and Churches etc. but not intrude into the secular space.

The problem is that if they overflow from the personal and the temples, we can ask the old question of “where does belief imposition stop?” As a theoretical question we can ask if some employer with a fundamentalist view deny employee coverage of the treatment of cancer because they would inadvertently be using something based on stem cells?

Or we can ask if  the 'Hijab is a fundamental human right of female Muslims since it is part of religious belief.  Can a store owner, with particular preconceived biases insist that any female who enters the stored wear one? Does a Jehovah's Witness owner who won’t employ blood transfusions get to say to an employee policy that pays for blood transfusions violates their faith and hence their fundamental freedom?

Historically we've stayed away from such Big Brother religions since they violate other values such as rights to privacy, private decisions and human dignity. In the 19th century, for example, the idea of American exceptionalism was undeerstood an assembly of special American social features.  We were a relatively free Republic based on democratic ideals and personal liberty, but also freedom from religious control.  As part of the separation idea we didn’t/don’t grant religious institutions the right to muscle into secular culture and mold it to the Procrustean bed of their preconceived ideas of society. Separating the state from religion should mean that there are no additional laws that people with religious beliefs levy upon others.  There is precedent here. We protect children from parents who won’t allow medical treatment for religious reasons. Of course, with things like abortion conservatives have argued that they are protecting a child-like unborn. Cathi Herrod, the president of the Center for Arizona Policy, the conservative Christian group that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and pushed SB 1062, claims that the bill is:

 "simply about protecting religious liberty and nothing else".

I'm not alone in distrusting the claim. I worry that SB 1062 was not innocently about faith or religious freedom. Rather it and similar efforts, is about political and ideological wedges and precedents. It uses a poorly formulated idea that provides a guise of preserving religious freedom.  What the advocates and activists behind it really want is some social action. In this case making discrimination against gays and the LGBT community legal.

To me it seems that we can keep religious freedom as a fundamental right, but not let it be invoked to harm others. In a proper setting we can have an informed discussion of terms like Freedom, and Freedom of Religion but behind this is a social struggle with a emotional engine driven by a hybrid of politics and religion. It helps to remember legal precedents defining the fine balance between the freedom to exercise one's religion and the civil rights of others.

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Stop Squirming: http://lesfemmesvoice.wordpress.com/

Open : http://kjzz.org/content/20736/after-sb-1062-backlash-gay-rights-advocates-help-businesses-declare-they-are-open-all