Each Wednesday Tim Carson shares the wonderings of heart and mind and the inspirations and quandaries of the spirit. You are invited to wonder along with him through the telling of stories, reflections on faith and observations on the events that shape our lives.  

Tim Carson

 

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Wednesday Wonder
July 2, 2014

 

The recent Supreme Court ruling involving Hobby Lobby and religious freedom - allowing the corporation to withhold health insurance for employees to cover certain birth-control methods that some would say end the life of a fertilized ovum - places several moral issues into dramatic relief.

 

For a moment, in order to get at one aspect of the issue with more clarity, let us suspend the debate over abortion. That issue - abortion - will remain for discussion on another day. It always does.

 

The core constitutional issue has to do with the prerogatives of a corporation to not comply with certain laws on account of moral or religious convictions. In this case, compliance with the Affordable Care Act would require covering health insurance provisions for employees that include birth-control methods abhorrent to the Green family, the owners of the corporation.

 

Several issues come to my mind:

 

First, religious freedom is never absolute, and I say that, as one who values religious freedom. To use a parallel example, the family that has religious convictions about healing without medical care and withholds the care of doctors or a hospital from their critically-ill child are held to other legal standards of the society, i.e., child endangerment. The larger, blanket law supersedes their religious freedom in order to protect the child. One principle trumps the other. So... religious freedom is never absolute. The court wants to give as much leeway as possible for religious communities to practice their faith. But there are limits to that freedom. Religious freedom is not absolute. It stands alongside other values, principles and laws.

 

Second, the court has decided that, in order to protect the moral freedom of corporations, those same corporations will decide what is moral for their employees. The question becomes, therefore, freedom for whom? What about the moral freedom of the employee? Although the court is honoring, as far as possible, any moral dissent of the corporation, how are they honoring the moral dissent of the employee? And is one more important than the other?

 

Third, corporations are not, after all, people. The court has ruled, recently, in issues related to campaign contributions that corporations may be viewed as individuals, as people. In my mind, this ruling is in error and represents a distortion of reality. Corporations are not individuals. Even corporations like Hobby Lobby that exhibit a strong religious culture, are not individual people. They have every right, under law, to establish their ethos and conduct their business according to their principles, but when it comes to judgments that affect all employees - all American citizens - the corporation cannot simply be viewed and treated, as a person who is holding moral principle. It is different, and we are in error to consider it the same.

 

And then there is the systemic issue of how health insurance is delivered to society. The Affordable Care Act simply reflects an expectation set decades ago, that companies - employers - should be the providers of health insurance to their employees. This was originally developed, as a protection for families who were uninsured and vulnerable, a good thing. But through this ruling of the high court, we see one of the weaknesses of that particular delivery system. Not only does it place a relative burden upon the company to provide health insurance to its employees, but it gives them too much power to determine what the employee should receive - and how. If, as the recent ruling concludes, the company, Hobby Lobby, is morally opposed to certain provisions of health care, it decides it won't provide it. What if its religious persuasion stands against, say, chemo therapy? Is that treatment then exempted? On religious grounds? As long as corporations decide what scope of health insurance is provided, the employee remains vulnerable and subject to their whims. The court has just reinforced this.

 

My guess is that we are likely to witness more and more corporations who have "gotten religion." And they will, like Hobby Lobby, be deciding what is best for their employees according to these newly-found spiritual principles. In the end, I believe, the freedom of the individual will once again be trumped by the freedom of the powerful, which is a trend that has grown unabated in recent years and is not for the best.


 

 

@Timothy Carson 2014

 

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