Slate - "Corporations Are People, the Biblical Sequel" by Dahlia Lithwick

[TomCADem]

The Supreme Court will decide whether companies don’t have to cover contraception because they have religious beliefs. Of course, I always understood that the reason why owners of a corporation's stock are not liable for a corporation's debts is that the corporation is separate entity from the stock holders. However, if we are going to pierce the corporate veil and say that corporations have the same religious beliefs as a majority of its stock holders, why not just ignore the whole corporate structure for purposes of liability? In other words, it seems like the right happily cherry picks when the corporation is a separate entity from its owners and when it should be treated as a mere alter ego of the owner.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/11/supreme_court_and_obamacare_contraception_mandate_are_companies_persons.html

On Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear a pair of religious freedom cases: Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius. The question is whether for-profit corporations may deny contraceptive coverage to their employees—coverage that the Affordable Care Act requires—based on their owners’ religious objections. As court-watchers have been predicting for months, the case will prove to be an unholy alliance of corporate personhood doctrine, religious freedom claims, and abortion rights. What, I ask, could possibly go wrong?

The court agreed to hear an appeal from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based chain of craft stores owned by a Christian family who claimed that the birth-control mandate violated their company’s religious freedom. The court also agreed to hear an appeal from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which went the opposite way, finding that Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., a cabinet manufacturer, did not have the same religious conscience rights as an individual. The split between these two circuit courts and other appeals courts, plus almost 50 other cases in the pipeline, meant that the Supreme Court was almost forced to weigh in.

The case raises critically important questions under both the religious freedom clauses of the First Amendment and a 1993 law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. RFRA was passed, as David Savage explains here, in response to a 1990 Supreme Court decision holding that neutral, generally applicable laws, if they only incidentally burden religious practice, may stand if the government has a rational basis for passing them (the lowest bar for courts to impose). RFRA effectively reinstated strict scrutiny—a higher standard for the government to meet—for laws that substantially burden religious exercise.

But do corporations have a right to religious freedom? Can they truly count as “persons” for getting the protections promised by RFRA? That’s the word the law uses, and these claims are novel, to say the very least. Since the Affordable Care Act was passed, various Christian employers have challenged the birth-control mandate under RFRA, claiming that providing certain specified "abortion causing" drugs (this is their scientifically contested claim about the effects of the morning-after pill) violates their most deeply held religious convictions. Exemptions to the contraception mandate in Obamacare already exist for explicitly religious organizations and various other employers but not for the type of for-profit corporations at issue in the two cases the Supreme Court has agreed to hear. The Obama administration also changed the birth-control requirement to allow certain nonprofits to opt out of paying for insurance directly and pass the costs on to their insurance provider. But again, that doesn’t apply to the big for-profit companies like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood.

[blkmusclmachine]

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