U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)—which Congress enacted to guide the Executive Branch and courts in defending that right—would not directly protect kosher or halal meat-processing corporations from a hypothetical federal rule that by generally banning certain meat-processing practices effectively banned kosher and halal meat processing by incorporated businesses.
Verrilli told the court that the customers of a kosher or halal meat-processing company–not the company itself–would have cause to sue in such a situation. But he did not directly say whether the Obama Administration believed that the customers of a kosher meat-processing corporation should prevail in such a case.
But he did not directly say whether the Obama Administration believed that the customers of a kosher meat-processing corporation should prevail in such a case.
At the end of an exchange that takes up three pages in the transcript of the court’s oral arguments in the case of Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, Justice Stephen Breyer pinned Verrilli down on a question first brought up by Justice Sam Alito.
“Take five Jewish or Muslim butchers and what you’re saying to them is if they choose to work under the corporate form, which is viewed universally, you have to give up on that form the Freedom of Exercise Clause that you’d otherwise have,” Breyer said to Verrilli.
“Now, looked at that way, I don’t think it matters whether they call themselves a corporation or whether they call themselves individuals,” said Breyer. “I mean, I think that’s the question you’re being asked, and I need to know what your response is to it.”
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10 Responses
Obama is anti-religious freedoms.
1. This is why we should oppose the Democrats. If people such as Hikind and Greenfield continue to support the enemies of the Jewish people, the frum voters should find alternatives. Regardless of what they were in the past, the 21st century Democrats are hard core anti-religious bigots.
2. This is also why we should be striving for better relations with others “peoples of faith”, be the Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, Mormons, Muslim, or whatever. Increasingly the dividing line in western societies is the relgious versus the anti-religious.
Basically the Admin’s position is that constitutional protections don’t apply to companies, which is just plain stupid, because all precedent is that they do.
I would STRONGLY urge EVERYONE to read the rest of the article because it is quite scary, yet unexpected, to see what the omamzer regime thinks about religious freedom.
To No. 1: Wouldn’t Pres. Obama be concerned if the constitution does not protect halal meat? After all, he is Muslim.
What “hypothetical federal rule” are they referring to? I have no idea whether to be worried or not.
This report is not worth the paper it isn’t printed on. It is an excerpt of oral argument in the Hobby Lobby case involving employer requirements to provide health care coverage to their employees which would include coverage that the employer or its stockholders would not want for themselves because it is contrary to the employer’s stockholders’ religious views. The report above fails to make clear that kashrus is not directly at issue in the case.
The report also fails to distinguish between (i) providing a product or service that is needed for religious observance, e.g., kosher slaughter and butchering, and (ii) providing compensation in the form of health care to employees of a business that otherwise is not engaged in providing any religious product or service, e.g., selling model airplanes or art supplies.
More importantly, and Torahically, employee benefits are not the employer’s money – they are the employees’ money, and Hobby Lobby has no more right to prohibit an employee from purchasing birth control for cash than from purchasing it through an employer-funded health plan for employees.
nfgo3: If Obama were a Muslim we wouldn’t have a problem. He’s a nominal Christian (who only associated with a church when his wife, and political necessity demanded it). Like most persons of Jewish descent he’s a secularist. Neither Christians nor Muslims have objectged to schedchita or bris milah – only secularists.
And Hobby Lobby is about requiring an employer to pay for other’s peoples contraceptives. Nothing in anyone’s views says an employer can prohibit an employee from doing whatever they want with their own money. If we hold as you do, what you are saying is the members of religious minorities are in effect denied the privilege of doing business in a corporate form. At no point in history has such an onerous discriminatory law ever been considered by the Federal government (some states banned Jews until the early 19th century, but Federal law from 1789 onwards banned religious tests – and a “test” that says you must believe in certain doctrine or rejecte a certain doctrine is exactly what the law intended back in 1787 – even before the Bill of Rights established freedom of religion).
The truth is that the secular left, which is dominated by secular Jews, are enemies of our people no more and no less than any of the nazis, crusader or cossacks we knew in Europe.
This is all Republican disinformation. The idea that a for-profit corporation can have a religion is absolute balderdash. How does a Christian corporation get baptized? Does someone dunk the corporate charter in a river? How does a Jewish corporation get a brit milah? Does a mohel strip off the cover of the corporate charter eight days after the corporation is registered? And can I count a corporation for a minyan?
Next thing you know, Mark Levin will insist that corporations have rights to vote in elections!
The right wingers who are apologists for this nonsense don’t realize that it would allow non-Jewish corporations to claim that they are expressing their religious rights to deny housing and employment to people they don’t like — like us Jews. They would scuttle 50 years of civil rights protection in the interest of ideological purity. And lest you think that this is theoretical, remember that the Ku Klux Klan justified their violent hate on religious grounds.
Expanding constitutional protection to corporations is an example of judicial activism that conservatives used to oppose. The people who wrote the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment would never have imagined such.
I guess there is a silver lining, though. I was in a shiva house last night and we only had nine guys and had to make a lot of phone calls to get the tenth. I could charter some corporations and bring nine corporate charters with me wherever I daven so this will never happen again. For that matter, I would never have to go to synagogue again because I would always have a minyan with me!
Comment No. 8 is so wrong in so many ways that I don’t know where to begin. But I will comment on only one matter. Comment No. 8 does not directly address my main point, which is that no corporation is compelled to pay for contraception. The money being spent on contraception is the employees’ money, which either sits in a trust fund for the employees’ exclusive benefit, or is used to purchase insurance for the benefit of the employees. Commenter No. does not dispute – and even agrees – that employers cannot tell employees how to spend their wages, but he/she cannot grasp that employee benefits are the employees’ money/property, not the employer’s.
And would someone please explain to Commenter No. 8 (because I said I would address only one of his/her errors) the difference between (i) employee benefits and (ii) loading Jews into cattle cars and killing them. His/her last paragraph evidences an inability to tell them apart.