In what was ridiculously described as a “dark day in American History” by one Huffington Post blogger, the Supreme Court yesterday held 5-4 that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) prohibited the Federal government from mandating that closely held, for-profit corporations facilitate access to certain contraception that acts after the point of conception in violation of their sincere religious beliefs.
Liberal bloggers weren’t the only ones overreacting to a decision that should be regarded as a major victory for religious freedom.
After the Court rendered its decision, President Obama defiantly declared that “[the] decision jeopardizes the health of women who are employed by these companies.” Hillary Clinton went so far as to compare the decision to the abuse of women in “unstable, anti-democratic” countries. The Court’s dissenting justices similarly bemoaned the effect a religious exception might have on women’s health, a sentiment mirrored by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog.
Perhaps the critics are correct on the policy. However, the Justices weren’t asked to debate the social policy merits of Obamacare; they were asked whether a Federal law, the RFRA, requires a religious exception to the contraception mandate. Based on that law’s language, the answer is clearly yes.
On the threshold question of whether the RFRA should apply to a big, bad, for-profit corporation like Hobby Lobby, the Court came to an easy answer. Page one (literally) of the U.S. Code defines a “person” as a “corporation…as well as individuals,” and the RFRA doesn’t indicate otherwise. The family that owns Hobby Lobby didn’t surrender their First Amendment rights the day they incorporated their company.
And believe it or not, the Court didn’t even bother to debate whether the Obama administration’s contraception mandate was a legitimate government policy pursuit – they simply assumed that it was. Where they took the administration to task was on the question of whether the mandate’s burden to Hobby Lobby’s religious freedom was absolutely necessary to accomplish its policy goals. It’s on that point that the Court concluded that Obamacare overreaches.
One bit of advice that Justice Samuel Alito offers to the Obama administration on this topic: If you want to argue that the contraception mandate is absolutely essential to your health care policy, don’t first grant broad exceptions to the contraception mandate for religious institutions and religious non-profit corporations, thereby completely invalidating your own argument! Whoops.
Or how about simply creating a government program which provides outright access to contraception without burdening any individual person or company, religious or otherwise?
Ultimately, the conservative Justices’ problem with the contraception mandate isn’t that they think it’s crappy public policy, it’s that they think it’s crappy (and illegal, and possibly unconstitutional) to violate deeply held, individual religious beliefs in pursuit of that policy.
One sensible statement on the RFRA you probably haven’t heard: “What this law basically says is that the Government should be held to a very high level of proof before it interferes with someone’s free exercise of religion…[L]et us never believe that the freedom of religion imposes on any of us some responsibility to run from our convictions. Let us instead respect one another’s faiths, fight to the death to preserve the right of every American to practice whatever convictions he or she has…”
No, that wasn’t a quote from Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Hobby Lobby, it’s from President Bill Clinton’s 1993 bill signing address on the RFRA, passed by a near-unanimous, Democrat-controlled Congress.
You see, liberals used to love religious freedom before they fell in love with Obamacare.
