Are corporations entitled to religious freedoms? Are they capable of being religious at all?
The US Supreme Court is to consider a case brought by two Christian-owned businesses, Hobby Lobby (equivalent to Britain’s Hobbycraft) and Conestoga Wood
(a cabinetmaker), are pleading exemption from part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the grounds that they have exemptions under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood argue that provisions in ACA forcing them to fund contraceptive healthcare for their employees breaches the businesses’ “religious freedom”. In order to shirk their responsibility to their employees, they are citing existing exemptions that exist for churches and RFRA, a 1993 Act passed to protect Native American individuals.
Of course, this illustrates the flaws of the US model of healthcare funding, however much of a step forward Obamacare is. As long as employers are directly liable for their employees’ medical treatment, they will have an incentive to wriggle out of as many costs as possible. And now, it seems, some employers will try to impose their morals on others. In the unlikely event that the US moved towards an NHS-style single payer healthcare system, these questions would be irrelevant. The employers would pay a simple, standard levy, everybody would have comprehensive health coverage and that would be that. Unfortunately, this is daydream material: such a system is a long way off being implemented in the US.
The idea that corporations are entitled to the same religious freedoms as people is ridiculous, and you would think the courts would agree. But let’s remember we’re taking about a legal world in which corporations are regarded as people. All an organisation can ever really be is a concept: an artificial construct created to regulate and control the activities of certain people at certain times to produce some benefit for some other people. In other words, a corporation is the sum of its employees’ labour. But the mistake that Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood have made is to fail to distinguish between owners and the owned entity. When owners incorporate a business, the state grants both certain privileges. The biggest of those being that the corporation can transfer assets to the owner, but never liabilities (not without the owner’s agreement, anyway). But business owners cannot have their cake and eat it: the flip side of this detachment from their corporation is that it is no longer their personal fiefdom. They must take into account other factors in their business.
What right do these owners have to dictate how their corporations’ employees live? That is what they are doing, by accepting their obligation to provide healthcare to their employees, but dictating which treatments they will pay for on the basis of their own moral standards. If the owner of Hobby Lobby is unhappy with “her/his” (actually Hobby Lobby’s) money being used to provide contraceptives to others, then they shouldn’t employ anybody. Even then, some of the money they pay in business taxes will pay government employees’ wages, which they are able to spend on contraceptives, pornography… Almost anything they like. Is Hobby Lobby going to plead exemption from paying taxes as well?
Let’s see what the Supreme Court has to say.