Conservative critics have criticized Justice Sotomayor’s decision to reject Hobby Lobby’s request for an emergency injunction on the birth control benefit under the ACA. The question before her was: Are Hobby Lobby’s rights so indisputably clear that an emergency injunction was required? She answered that question correctly: no.
Physical “rescues” were meant to harass clinics out of existence. The new “civil disobedience” call of anti-choice corporations refusing to cover contraception and sterilization procedures even in the face of federal court order to the contrary is just the corporate version of this same sit-in tactic.
Within a day of a district court judge ruling the retail craft giant needed to comply with the health care reform law Hobby Lobby asks the appeallate courts to take a look.
For the first time, a court has held that the religious rights of corporations and persons are not co-extensive. Individuals may avail themselves of constitutional protections of religious freedoms, but secular corporations may not.
National retail craft chain Hobby Lobby wants a federal court to rule that secular businesses have First Amendment religious rights.
It seems outlandish to claim that the Catholic bishops’ own crusade against contraception is anti-Catholic. Still, arguments that this position is anti-Catholic seem not only well-founded but reasonable, whereas the Catholic bishops’ incessant interfering in American women’s lady-business is spectacularly unreasonable.
An attempt to skew results still only receives a small majority of people in favor of overturning the contraception mandate.
Can a for-profit secular corporation exercise religious rights? Hobby Lobby thinks so.
The owners of the Chicago Bears fear that requiring the football team to furnish its employees contraception tramples upon their religious freedom. And they even have a song about it.
Women’s rights activists and Christian activists join together to urge the retail chain to drop their lawsuit.
