Just after the one-year anniversary of the U. S. Supreme Court overturning the federal ban on same-sex marriage, the nation’s top court made another seminal decision — but this one turns the civil-rights clock back.
On Monday, the court handed down its long-awaited ruling in the Hobby Lobby Stores case, finding that corporations could be exempt from the Affordable Care Act provision requiring that employer-sponsored health-care plans include contraception based on the owners’ sincerely held religious beliefs. The ruling only applies to companies where five or fewer people own more than half of the company stock.
While the ruling was narrow, implications could be broad.
First, the practical angle. The health care of employees at some companies is now subject to the whims of owners, and those personal beliefs will amount to added financial burden for countless women as they seek to access birth control. All three women on the Supreme Court dissented with the majority opinion.
Besides the tangible impact on workers, the decision reflects a worrisome commentary on the expression of “religious freedom.” While Hobby Lobby’s top management is entitled to personal religious beliefs that oppose contraception, that they can impose the personal on the professional is troublesome. And it prompts the question of what’s coming next.
While the justices were careful to emphasize that this ruling is limited solely to the issue of the ACA contraception mandate, the theory behind the ruling — that a business need not comply with a law whose tenets violate the personal opinions of business leaders — is one that the LGBT community has been struggling to confront for years. There have been innumerable cases of business owners denying service to, firing or denying promotions to or committing other acts of discrimination against LGBT people in the name of their religious beliefs. With no federal law banning LGBT discrimination and more than two-dozen states, Pennsylvania included, still allowing LGBT people to be discriminated against in employment, housing and public accommodations, it is supremely important that there is no added route allowing discrimination.
As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent: “Although the court attempts to cabin its language to closely held corporations, its logic extends to corporations of any size, public or private.”
Having a ruling on the books that permits religious beliefs to permeate the workplace is a dangerous precedent.