A year ago, for the fifth straight year, Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. raised wages for its full-time hourly employees. They’re now paid $14 an hour. The hourly wage for part-time employees was increased to $9.50, but David Green, the Oklahoma City-based arts-and-crafts chain’s founder and CEO, has said the “lion’s share” of his nearly 18,000 employees work full time.
Mr. Green and his family say they try to run their company on “biblical principles.” Paying fair wages is one of them. So is closing the stores on Sunday. So was health insurance, which Mr. Green was shocked to learn in 2012 provided a broad range of contraceptive options.
He learned that from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a conservative public interest law firm. The fund invited Mr. Green to challenge the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that large companies provide female employees with contraceptive options.
The ACA does not require coverage for RU-486, or Mifepristone, the so-called “abortion pill.” It does require coverage of emergency contraceptive drugs Plan B and Ella and intrauterine devices, which prevent pregnancies in ways that medical science says are not the same as abortion.
The Becket Fund begs to disagree, as do Mr. Green and his family, which is why the law, science and faith again collided inside and outside the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
The issues raised in the joined cases Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius are not simple. The court took the rare step of expanding the time allotted for Tuesday’s oral arguments from 60 minutes to 90 minutes. Lower courts came to diametrically opposite conclusions, suggesting there is plenty of law to go around.
The decision, expected in late June, will depend entirely on which parts of the argument individual justices find most compelling. In their questions Tuesday, the justices were all over the ballpark.
Is this purely a First Amendment freedom of religion case for the Greens and the Hahn family, Pennsylvania Mennonites who run Conestoga Wood Products? Or does it extend a second right under the First Amendment to for-profit corporations? Since the Citizens United decision in 2010, corporations have been people as far as political speech is concerned.
What happens if shareholders of a public company do not share its executives’ faith? Should closely held family companies have rights that public companies don’t?
What happens if corporations discover a deeply held religious belief against paying minimum wages or Social Security taxes? In 1982, in ruling against an Amish businessman who objected to paying Social Security taxes for his employees, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “not all burdens on religion are unconstitutional” particularly if they “accomplish an overriding governmental interest.”
We would argue that safe and affordable health care options for women are an overriding governmental interest, to say nothing of protecting the religious freedom of employees.
The religious beliefs of the Greens and the Hahns are theirs to hold. At its core, their argument is that the court should grant them protections that they would deny their employees.
— Copley News Service
