That Old Time Corporate Religion

The United States Supreme Court has decided to hear two cases about corporations who don't want to pay for their employees' birth control:

The lead plaintiff before the court is Hobby Lobby, a chain of more than 500 arts and crafts stores with more than 13,000 employees. The owners are conservative Christians who object to some forms of birth control and contend that the mandate thus abridges their religious rights in violation of both the Constitution and federal law.

Their argument is basically that corporations are people and have religious rights. The entire argument is specious: can the corporation go to church? Take communion? Be baptized? Get married? Have souls? Go to heaven?

The idea that a corporation is a person is sheer nonsense. Corporations are legal fictions that exist only on paper. People are born, not incorporated in Delaware. If you're a believer, you believe that God created you. Corporations are completely secular creations of government, granted their existence by an act of Congress. Corporations aren't even in the Constitution. They certainly aren't in the Bible.

Unlike people, corporations can be bought and sold, which means that Hobby Lobby's "deeply held religious beliefs" could go completely out the window if the owners decided to sell the business or died in a car accident. The sheer ridiculousness of corporate religion becomes apparent when you consider publicly held corporations like Exxon or GM.

The purpose of corporate entities is to allow individuals to evade personal legal and financial responsibility for the actions of the corporation, on the theory that they can take financial risks that will benefit the economy at large while protecting their families' future. For example, corporations can declare bankruptcy and that fact will not appear on the personal credit reports of the corporate officers who made the decisions that caused the bankruptcy.

The provisions of the ACA apply to the corporation, not to the owners of Hobby Lobby. Those provisions may violate the religious beliefs of the owners, but they are not the corporation: it is an entity independent of them, which they can sell and divest themselves of any responsibility. If Hobby Lobby is claiming  that the corporation is just an extension of themselves, then their business is not a corporation, but rather a partnership. In other words, they have willfully made incorrect corporate filings.

So, if the owners of Hobby Lobby want the legal and financial shield against personal liability that incorporation provides, they need to accept all the secular responsibilities that running a legal entity created by government entails. Otherwise, they should acknowledge that they're just a partnership and accept full personal responsibility for all legal and financial liabilities of the company.

Corporations should not even have the legal standing to make the argument about the free exercise of religion. The Supreme Court should rule that if Hobby Lobby doesn't want to pay for birth control coverage, it should reorganize as a partnership and file another lawsuit.

Stopping there would just kick the can down the road, though. The Supreme Court should also decide that companies -- partnerships or corporations -- can't pick and choose what laws they obey based on the prejudices of their owners. Today, Hobby Lobby doesn't want to pay for birth control coverage. Tomorrow, a Jew or Hindu won't want to cover drugs that contain stearic acid (made from pig or cow fat), or Jehovah's Witness won't want to cover blood transfusions, or a Christian Scientist won't want to cover any medical care.

If Hobby Lobby prevails in the Supreme Court, what's next? Will they come back and argue that they have the right to fire employees who use birth control, because they don't want their money (the wages they pay employees) to be used to violate their religious beliefs? Will they then claim that they can only hire Christians, because they don't want their money to pay for synagogues and mosques?

We already settled these questions of employment law decades ago. The argument over the birth control mandate is just another variation on the same theme of hiring blacks and Jews, with the ultimate goal of overturning those laws and going back to the bad old days when employers could force employees to do anything they wanted.