Get Down Off That Hobby Lobby Horse

As referred to me by Wombat-socho's sort of daily "Live at Five: 07.03.14", Megan McArdle answers some of the lefties complaints about the Supreme Courts recent Hobby Lobby decision, giving a closely held corporation the ability to not fully comply with Obamacare's administratively imposed contraceptive mandate.

Answers to All Your Hobby Lobby Questions

A few selections:

1) What can stop a company from arguing that it is against the owner's sincere religious beliefs to pay workers a minimum wage?

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not a blank check to religious groups to do what they want. The law says that the religious belief must be sincerely held, and also that the government can burden the exercise of that belief if it has a compelling state interest that cannot easily be achieved in any other way. That's why no one has successfully started the Church of Not Paying Any Taxes, though people have been trying that dodge for years.

Well, darn it, there goes that one.

3) But Hobby Lobby buys stuff from China, which has a horrible one-child policy that forces abortions!

We're in pretty complex moral territory here, but everyone -- EVERYONE -- is at least remotely commercially associated with something they find appalling. Almost no one extrapolates out their moral beliefs to the most stringent possible application, else those of us who believe that charity is a moral obligation would be forced to sell everything we own until we were as poor as the poorest peasant. . .

There's a whole list of "gotchas" that need dispelling, but this gets to the heart of them. Without throwing away all of human civilization and eating shoots, roots, leaves, and civilized people's pets, it's pretty damned hard to get away from indirectly doing business with people whose practices you find abhorrent.

7) Why does the Supreme Court think corporations are people? Isn't that obviously ridiculous?

The Supreme Court does not think that corporations are people in the sense that you mean -- the Supreme Court will not be ruling that Wendy's has a Title IX right to play college sports. But we extend corporations many of the rights that people get because otherwise the results would be horrifying: The government would have the right to shut down the presses at the New York Times; search Google's servers without a warrant whenever they liked; tell churches (usually organized as corporations) what they could believe; deny nonprofits the right to organize protests; and otherwise abridge fundamental human rights.

On the other hand, I'd love to see Republican administration try to enforce the "no opinions" corporate mandate that liberals seem to think applies to selectively chosen corporations applied to the New York Times, the Washington Post and MSNBC, to name just a few.

10) What if your employer decided it didn't want you spending your salary on IUDs because they're paying for it?

Why does so much of this argument end up in ludicrous hypotheticals? First, no employer that we know of does this; second, they couldn't do this, because of health-care privacy laws; and third, if they tried to argue from RFRA, the Supreme Court would not side with them, because again, the liberty promised under RFRA is balanced against other interests, not absolutes. RFRA has been around for 20 years, and we haven't legalized, say, pedophilia.

Because, shut up!

12) What if my employer says it has a sincere religious belief in human sacrifice -- can he kill me?

Yes. If your employer has a deeply held religious belief in human sacrifice, they can strap you in a cage, reach into your chest with their bare hands to pull out your still-beating heart, then drop the cage into a fiery pit. It’s a tough break, but from time to time, the Tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots. Sorry about that.

Can we get Megan on the Supreme Court?