Reactions to the Hobby Lobby Case

On June 30^th, the Supreme Court ruled that the family-owned, multi-million dollar corporation Hobby Lobby does not have to provide contraceptive coverage as part of the healthcare package to their employees despite the Affordable Care Act. This decision was made under the legal reasoning that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) grants accommodation for those who are substantially burdened by law (so long as certain other requisites are met – see a previous blog explaining this).

This ruling was poorly made. It does a great injustice to common men and women of conscience, regardless of their official faith credo. Nevertheless, it is a great opportunity to discuss and correct the ways we consider legal justification for rights in this country.

I have given my own take on some of the problems with this case in a previous blog. Rather than rehash those same concerns, I thought I would take a different tack by instead focusing on the reasoning and rationalization that some folks sympathetic to Hobby Lobby have been using.

Here are some common reactions I have been hearing:

“Those drugs abort fetuses.”

Or, perhaps put less dramatically, “Hobby Lobby simply doesn’t want to pay for drugs that cause abortions.” Either way, this reaction offers a reasonable position on its face IF this were actually the case. In reality, the four drugs (Plan B, ella, and 2 IUDs) Hobby Lobby and Conestoga are “religiously opposed to” DO NOT produce abortions.

Dr. Ron Hammel, senior director of ethics for the Catholic Health Association in the US once said, “"One of the well known truisms in ethics is that good moral judgments depend in part on good facts." There has been a considerable amount of research that has gone into learning how contraceptives work, especially these four, and the newest research has been showing that they do not interrupt established pregnancies or inhibit implantation. There are articles – some by credible news sources, some by Christian publications – that discuss this research here, here, here, and here.

As Dennis Sullivan, director of Cedarville University's Center for Bioethics who has recently peer-reviewed much of the research for publication says, "Our claims of conscience should be based on scientific fact, and we should be willing to change our claims if facts change."

Nevertheless, I can imagine some people would still feel wary. I can appreciate that. I would warn those folks to abstain from using those forms of contraceptives if they feel this way. But to limit another person’s legal rights, the moral reasoning required must be stringent! Limiting another person from partaking in a universal entitlement due to our idiosyncratic or sectarian beliefs should be done only in the direst of circumstances. Having no scientific evidence to validate personal fears of material complicity hardly even comes close to meeting those requirements.

“No one is being denied access to those four drugs.”

This is a straw-man argument. No one is proposing that Hobby Lobby is taking away their employees’ legal right to purchase and use those drugs. This misrepresents the problem and misdirects our attention from what should actually be considered.

The ACA, like it or not, created healthcare coverage as part of a compensation package to be a universal entitlement. It was determined by the Supreme Court to be a legal and constitutional regulation. These four drugs were included in the compensation package as a free benefit at the urging of medical and public health professionals who concluded (with data) that by removing costs as a barrier, more women and families would be able to make different contraceptive and family planning decisions that align with their medical needs and life situation, not financial constraints, the benefits of which are long-reaching and should be something we can all intuitively appreciate.

Therefore, Hobby Lobby’s request for religious accommodation is to remove these four drugs from the universal compensation package. These employees, then, are being denied a portion of their compensation and a universal entitlement because of the particular religious beliefs of their employer. This is a fairly simple scenario to analogize.

Using other compensation packages as universal entitlements:

Imagine your boss is Amish and doesn’t want to pay extra for overtime or holidays. Fair?

Imagine the boss of a construction company belongs to a religion that believes wind spirits will protect everyone so he doesn’t purchase hardhats or safety cables. However, he does allow the employees to make those purchases themselves if they like. Those costs run equal to one month’s salary. Fair? Good? Moral? Reasonable?

Then there are the analogies within this particular compensation package about medical procedures and medicines that are considered immoral to many other religions.

The problem is not that the women are being denied access to those four drugs, it is the question of why an employer’s religion is a significant enough reason to deny particular employees a universal benefit? It, effectively, imposes a pay cut or cost on the employee according to their employer’s religion, which is particularly significant if that cost endangers their employee’s life and well-being, which contraception absolutely does.

“The owners of Hobby Lobby should not have to pay for something they find morally objectionable.”

This is by far the most legitimate reasoning. I am sympathetic to this kind of dilemma. I don’t think many people would straight-up object to this rationalization as irrelevant to moral concerns, but this concern is not absolute over all other moral concerns. And that is the key issue, here!

For example, I find lethal military intervention morally objectionable, but I am still required to pay taxes which support them. The public welfare, humanitarian intervention, and government efficiency are often moral concerns which override my individual moral and religious objections to the use of lethal force. And I have to accept that. Religious liberty buys me no accommodation.

Or think of the common examples of a business owner who doesn’t agree with life-saving organ transplants. Or blood transfusions. Or psychiatric medications. Or vaccinations. These are the kinds of life-changing procedures or medicines that were deemed worthy of being indiscriminately offered to all for a reason. The moral concerns were significant!! Reverting back to making them subject to the self-reported moral objections of employers goes against the moral calculus that was deemed constitutional just two years earlier.

In many ways, this goes back to the previous answer in that they are not “paying for the contraceptives” but are “offering a compensation package” which includes free access to those things. That seems like a semantic difference but it is at least as important as the distinction between handing an employee money which they use to buy an IUD vs. offering them a healthcare package which includes the free use of an IUD.

Hobby Lobby is saying they bear moral complicity only when it serves them legally. This is inconsistent and myopic. It fails the rigorous sort of ethical analysis required if those in power wish to deny their workers a benefit universally granted to every other worker in the US. That should be a high threshold to meet and this reasoning has consistently been deemed subordinate to the moral concerns of the general health and welfare of all, equality in the workplace, and rule of law.

“Hobby Lobby provides coverage for 16 of the 20 contraceptives.”

This is the strangest rationalization I have heard so far. It rings to the tune of “You should be happy with the freedom we gave you!”

This analogy is imperfect but here goes: Imagine if every store in the Southeastern United States decided they will not sell handguns to women. Their defense: “We would be happy to sell women any other gun, just not the handguns.” The response would probably be confusion. And some kind of 2^nd Amendment firestorm.

This is a horrible rationalization. Please stop using it. If a woman and her doctor decide the best treatment for her is one of the four contraceptives Hobby Lobby isn’t covering, the other 16 are hardly a consolation.

“A businessman should be able to run his business as he pleases.”

This is perhaps one of the more dangerous rationalizations I hear because it is both true and very untrue. Yes, businessmen are given a lot of leeway on how they run their companies. This is why people move jobs and love or hate their bosses. But we have universal regulations (as well as regulations per sector) that all employers are obligated to abide by which are imposed by the government as our collective agent. And these regulations are largely in place for the safety and welfare of the public. They are also widely lauded and protected.

For instance, a businessman can’t fire a woman for being pregnant. A businessman can’t hire children. A businessman must pay workers a minimum wage and additional compensation for working on holidays and over 40 hours per week. A businessman must provide break periods and food intervals. A businessman must abide by basic safety regulations. A businessman must pay both personal taxes on his income and taxes on the income of his business.

A for-profit businessman has the legal protection from liability of incorporation. This is what sets businesses apart from their owners as individuals as well as from non-profits and churches. Blurring this line in some naive attempt to “let a businessman run his business” is a dangerous step away from those distinctions and their incumbent protections.

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The Supreme Court rules on existing law and we live in a democracy. Our voice is not lost on this issue. RFRA was a law passed because the public was outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision in Employment Division v. Smith.

It is our responsibility as men and women of conscience to consider the implications of a corporation having rights of faith requiring accommodation from law and petition our government to remedy the grave error that has been done through this ruling.