How to Kill the Hobby Lobby Decision in One Not-That-Easy Step
8/04/14 4:20pm
Michelle Dean
Over at The Nation, Katha Pollitt proposes a solution to the ongoing rain of fire, brimstone, rubber and glass that followed the Supreme Court's June decision in Hobby Lobby. Repeal the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, she says, and be done with it. Ayup.
The RFRA, you might recall, is the little piece of peyote-rights-inspired legislation on which the Court relied in Hobby Lobby. The idea was that the government should always have to justify, in the most compelling terms, any infringement on anyone's freedom of religion. It was enacted with the support of a broad coalition of right and left, all the colors of the American democratic rainbow. It was all very noble, then.
Now, 20 years later, it was the RFRA that chiefly gave the Supreme Court the cover of Congressional intent to hold that Christian employers need not contribute a single red cent to subsidize the medical costs of all that whoring around their employees do. And it stands ready to introduce a complicated web of exceptions for the nuttily religious into everyday American life. Trolling Satanists have already leapt into the game.
Pollitt's arguments to repeal it are mainly policy-based. She, like you, simply doesn't think that it makes sense to exempt everyone from everything they don't happen to believe in:
Imagine an anti-vaxxer a few years hence claiming the right not to be informed of the dangers of measles. Same-sex marriage should be legal because a clergyperson wants to perform them? What happens when a Mormon elder or a Muslim imam claims the right to express his faith by performing polygamous marriages? Even if religion were not the basically conservative social force it is in American life, expanding the religious freedom of individuals or corporations is simply not a good way to make public policy.
http://gawker.com/how-to-kill-hobby-lobby-in-one-not-that-easy-step-1615783411
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