Category Archives: Religion

A Federal Judge Tells the Supreme Court to Shut the F*** Up

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Judge Richard G. Kopf, presumably a Republican since he was appointed to the Federal bench by George H. W. Bush (the first one), reacts to the Hobby Lobby ruling:

In the Hobby Lobby cases, five male Justices of the Supreme Court, who are all members of the Catholic faith and who each were appointed by a President who hailed from the Republican party, decided that a huge corporation, with thousands of employees and gargantuan revenues, was a “person” entitled to assert a religious objection to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate because that corporation was “closely held” by family members. To the average person, the result looks stupid and smells worse.

To most people, the decision looks stupid ’cause corporations are not persons, all the legal mumbo jumbo notwithstanding. The decision looks misogynist because the majority were all men. It looks partisan because all were appointed by a Republican. The decision looks religiously motivated because each member of the majority belongs to the Catholic church, and that religious organization is opposed to contraception. While “looks” don’t matter to the logic of the law (and I am not saying the Justices are actually motivated by such things), all of us know from experience that appearances matter to the public’s acceptance of the law….

Next term is the time for the Supreme Court to go quiescent – this term and several past terms has proven that the Court is now causing more harm (division) to our democracy than good by deciding hot button cases that the Court has the power to avoid. As the kids says, it is time for the Court to STFU. 

Being one of the “most people”, there is no doubt in my mind that the Hobby Lobby decision was stupid, partisan, misogynist and religiously-motivated, but it’s understandable that Judge Kopf expresses himself more judiciously.

There is a little more on the subject from the judge here:

Remembering Alexander Bickel’s passive virtues and the Hobby Lobby cases.

The Burdensome and Anti-Christian “EBSA Form 700”

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As noted in the previous post, a majority of justices on the Supreme Court granted Wheaton College a temporary reprieve from having to fill out and distribute EBSA Form 700. That’s the form that’s supposed to be used by non-profit religious organizations to say they don’t want their employees’ health insurance to cover some or any forms of contraception.

Wheaton told the Supreme Court that Form 700 constituted a significant burden on their religious beliefs. They preferred writing their own letter to the government instead. Understandably, the three women on the Supreme Court thought that was crazy (I’m guessing that the other Democrat on the Court, Justice Breyer, agreed with Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Kagan, but this isn’t the kind of issue that requires the whole Court to express an opinion. Maybe he was out of town or so fed up with some of his colleagues that he’s thinking of giving up the law.)

As government forms go, Form 700 is simplicity itself. Here are its key features:

This form is to be used to certify that the health coverage established or maintained or arranged by the organization listed below qualifies for an accommodation with respect to the federal requirement to cover certain contraceptive services without cost sharing…

[Enter name of objecting organization, individual authorized to make this certification, name and address, etc.]

I certify that, on account of religious objections, the organization opposes providing coverage for some or all of any contraceptive services that would otherwise be required to be covered; the organization is organized and operates as a nonprofit entity; and the organization holds itself out as a religious organization.

[Signature and date.]

The organization or its plan must provide a copy of this certification to the plan’s health insurance issuer (for insured health plans) or a third party administrator (for self-insured health plans) in order for the plan to be accommodated with respect to the contraceptive coverage requirement.

That’s basically it. The form doesn’t even ask for the name and address of the health insurance issuer/administrator, something I certainly would have included if I were the senior bureaucrat responsible for EBSA Form 700.

I think Wheaton objected to this form because they didn’t want to send a copy to their health insurance issuer or third party administrator. Apparently, they thought that doing so would amount to being too cooperative with the government in its anti-Christian effort to make sure health insurance covers contraception. Justice Sotomayor argued in her dissent that forcing the government to identify the issuer/administrator and then send them a copy would be wasting the government’s time, especially if such religious exemptions become common.

Her main point, however, was that it’s the Court’s job to determine whether a law is too burdensome on somebody, not simply take their word for it, as the majority on the Court did here. But the activist Republican judges on the Supreme Court are clearly making this stuff up as they go along.

The burdensome (?) and anti-Christian (?) EBSA Form 700 is available here.

The Court’s brief ruling and Justice Sotomayor’s lengthy dissent is here.

Five Bad Men Screw Us Again, Part 2

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(1) As further evidence that the all-male, all-Roman Catholic, all-Republican majority on the Supreme Court is willing to sacrifice legal principles to ideology, consider this statement from Justice Alito’s opinion: “A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends”.

Among those ends, however, is limiting the liability of the corporation’s owners, as discussed in this article from Mother Jones. The author explains how ascribing the owners’ religious beliefs to a corporation undermines the idea of a corporation:

[Quoting from an earlier Supreme Court decision:] “Linguistically speaking, the employee and the corporation are different ‘persons’, even where the employee is the corporation’s sole owner. After all, incorporation’s basic purpose is to create a distinct legal entity, with legal rights, obligations, powers, and privileges different from those of the natural individuals who created it, who own it, or whom it employs.” 

That separation is what legal and business scholars call the “corporate veil,” and it’s fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it’s in question. By letting Hobby Lobby’s owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.

(2) The Hobby Lobby ruling was supposedly a limited one. But anytime the Supreme Court rules, lower courts invariably extend the Supreme Court’s “logic” to other cases. Believe it or not, the Supreme Court itself has already ordered lower courts to do just that, as Mother Jones reports:

Less than a day after the United States Supreme Court issued its divisive ruling on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has already begun to toss aside the supposedly narrow interpretation of the decision. On Tuesday, the [Court] ordered lower courts to rehear any cases where companies had sought to deny coverage for any type of contraception, not just the specific types Hobby Lobby was opposed to.

In related news, religious leaders have written to the White House asking that proposed regulations regarding the hiring of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people by federal contractors include a religious exemption.When this issue comes to the Supreme Court, we can expect the Republican majority to agree that discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation and even their gender is one more religious belief the government should not burden.

(3) In maybe he most bizarre development of all, the Court yesterday granted a request from Wheaton College to be temporarily exempted from filling out and distributing copies of a particular government form. The form in question allows a non-profit religious organization to declare its opposition to insurance coverage for contraceptives. From the Supreme Court’s ruling:

The applicant need not use the form prescribed by the Government, EBSA Form 700, and need not send copies to health insurance issuers or third-party administrators.

Instead, the Court said it would be sufficient to send a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services stating the organization’s opposition to contraception without identifying its health insurance issuer or third-party administrator. Apparently, the majority agreed that the prescribed use of Form 700 would constitute a serious burden on Wheaton College’s religious beliefs, while sending a letter to the government wouldn’t or didn’t.

The three women on the Supreme Court pointed out the absurdity of this latest ruling in a dissent called “unusually fierce” by the New York Times. Justice Sotomayor stated that this latest ruling “undermines confidence” in the Court. She also pointed out what should be obvious to everybody:

Thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened — no matter how sincere or genuine that belief may be — does not make it so.

(5) Remember to vote, even in mid-term elections like the one four months from now, and, most importantly, never vote for a Republican.

Five Bad Men Screw Us Again

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I didn’t want to write about the Supreme Court decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores. That’s the recent case in which the Republican majority ruled that a corporation can refuse to provide health insurance for certain kinds of contraception on religious grounds. However, one way to stop thinking about something is to write about it, and this is not a subject that’s fun to think about:

1) It’s no coincidence that the five Republicans on the Supreme Court are prone to rule against and ignore the rights of women to end or prevent pregnancies. Those five Republicans are all Roman Catholics.

2) Having previously declared that corporations should be allowed to spend on political campaigns because they have the same right to free speech that people do, the Republican majority has ruled again that corporations are no different from people. The law at issue in Burwell vs. Hobby states that the government should not “substantially burden a person’s religious beliefs”. Although corporations are treated as persons in some legal contexts, and it’s proper for the government to respect people’s religion up to a point, it makes no sense to ascribe religious beliefs to a corporation.

In addition, people’s right to practice their religion as they wish does not give them the right to harm other people. According to the majority opinion, however, a corporation can not only have religious beliefs, those beliefs should be honored even though acting on those beliefs negatively affects the corporation’s employees, their families and the rest of society (one of the majority’s suggestions is that taxpayers pay for contraception if corporations won’t – as if the Republicans in Congress would agree to that). 

3) Religion can be a wonderfully flexible way to justify all kinds of behavior. In this case, the corporations claimed that dropping all health insurance coverage for their employees, so that their employees could instead get insurance through the government-run exchanges, would also infringe on their (the corporations’) religious beliefs, even though allowing their employees to use the government exchanges would save the corporations money and benefit their employees. “It is our firmly-held, specific religious belief that you should get your health insurance through our company instead of a government website, but it shouldn’t cover certain kinds of care.” Right.

4) Allowing employers to dictate which health insurance their employees have, on religious or any other grounds, is yet another reason the United States should join the rest of the industrialized world and adopt taxpayer-supported, government-regulated, single-payer health insurance.

5) The idea that the owners of a business shouldn’t be forced to spend money for something they don’t like assumes that the money in question is theirs, just like the money in your checking account is yours. However, economists have found that the money a company spends on health insurance would otherwise generally be paid to employees as wages. After all, health insurance is a form of compensation and businesses tend to offer as little compensation as possible (except for senior management, of course). As Uwe Reinhardt writes:

Evidently the majority of Supreme Court justices … believe that the owners of “closely held” business firms buy health insurance for their employees out of the kindness of their hearts and with the owners’ money. On that belief, they accord these owners the right to impose some of their personal preferences – in this case their religious beliefs — on their employee’s health insurance…. [But research shows that] the premiums ostensibly paid by employers to buy health insurance coverage for their employees are actually part of the employee’s total pay package — the price of labor, in economic parlance – and that the cost of that fringe benefit is recovered from employees through commensurate reductions in take-home pay.

6) This is a case in which religion is being allowed to trump science. These corporations object to particular kinds of contraception on the grounds that they are equivalent to having an abortion. But medical researchers have shown that the methods in question (certain intrauterine devices and the “morning after” pill) don’t actually work that way, as discussed here:

The owners of Hobby Lobby told the Court that they were willing to cover some forms of contraception but believed that the so-called morning-after pills and two kinds of IUDs can cause what they believe to be a type of abortion, by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall or causing an already implanted egg to fail to thrive… The scientific consensus is against this idea…Most scientists believe that [these methods] interfere with the ability of sperm to get to an egg in time to fertilize it before they die….Research does not support the idea that they prevent fertilized eggs to implant.

If a religious belief is based on faulty science, that belief should be given less respect by the rest of us. It’s safe to assume, for example, that even this Supreme Court would have ruled differently if the religious belief in question had been that certain kinds of contraception cause droughts.

7) There have been a lot of dumb arguments in favor of this decision or suggesting that it’s not a big deal. The truth is that this decision could set a very bad precedent, opening the door to other claims for special treatment, especially given the Republican majority on the Court. In addition, trying to find a job with another company isn’t a great option for many people; getting pregnant is a very big deal; IUD’s are among the most effective form of birth control; it can cost some women a month’s pay to get one; the morning after pill is an important option for women; and choosing to have sex shouldn’t disqualify people from getting appropriate medical care (people also choose to smoke, spend a lot of time on their couches and eat at McDonald’s). As the saying goes, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

8) It’s been clear since their decision in Bush vs. Gore, when the Republican justices decided that we didn’t need an accurate vote count in a Presidential election, that lacking proper legal justification for their decisions won’t stop them from advancing their political agenda. All Supreme Court justices issue rulings consistent with their political perspectives, but these particular justices are extremists. They may have some shame, but it’s hardly worth mentioning.

How Religious Persecution Was Justified by the Church

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Continuing on through J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy, I came to the section on the 17th-century philosopher Pierre Bayle. He was a Huguenot (a French Protestant) who lived the last 25 years of his life in Holland as a refugee from religious persecution.

One of Bayle’s books, published in 1686, was written in response to a single passage in the Bible: A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23, ‘Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full’. Here’s how Bayle explains his decision to write it:

A French Gentleman … having fled for Refuge into England … told me, as we often discoursed on the Subject, That among all the Cavils with which the Missionaries [monks, priests, etc.] had pestered him, none appeared to him more senseless, and yet at the same time more thorny and perplexing, than that drawn from these words of Jesus Christ, “Compel them to come in”, in favor of Persecution, or, as they termed it, the charitable and salutary Violence exercised on Heretics, to recover them from the Error of their Ways. He let me know how passionately he desired to see this Chimera of Persecutors confounded: And fancying he observed in me not only an extreme Aversion to persecuting Methods, but something too of a Vein for entering into the true Reasons of things; he was pleased to say, he looked on me as a proper Person for such an Undertaking, and urged that, succeeding in it as he expected, I should do great Service to the Cause of Truth, and indeed to the whole World. 

Luke 14:23 was interpreted by the authorities (most famously, by St. Augustine) as one of the strongest (and possibly the strongest) biblical justification for religious persecution. It’s part of the Parable of the Great Banquet or Great Supper:

Then [Jesus] said unto him:

A certain man made a great supper, and bade many:
And sent his servant at supper time to say to them that were bidden, Come; for all things are now ready. And they all … began to make excuses.
The first said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it: I pray thee have me excused.
And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them: I pray thee have me excused.
And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.
So that servant came, and showed his lord these things. Then the master of the house being angry said to his servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.
And the servant said … it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.
And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.

For I [Jesus] say unto you, that none of those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper.
And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them,
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

Being forced to toe the religious line, by whatever means possible, was supposed to be for a sinner’s own good, but a story about “a certain man” who makes his invited guests show up for a banquet, without any mention of violence, is an amazingly weak justification for imprisoning, torturing or executing anybody. 

Bayle responds from an ethical point of view. He argues that “persecution cannot bring about the sort of inner religious devotion that would alone be pleasing to God”: 

He announces … that his mode of interpreting the [Biblical] text is entirely new. Leaving textual criticism, philology, history and mysteries entirely aside, he bases his reading on just one principle: “any literal interpretation which carries an obligation to commit iniquity is false” [281-282]. 

Since religious persecution was “iniquitous, unjust and destructive of any moral order in society”, Bayle concluded that Luke 14:23 couldn’t possibly justify such behavior. The Catholic officials who were persecuting the Huguenots must have misinterpreted the Bible.

I don’t know if Bayle ever responded to another passage that was used to justify religious persecution. That’s Leviticus 24:16:

And he that blasphemeth the Name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the Congregation shall certainly stone him: As well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the Name of the Lord, shall be put to death.

It’s not a parable and doesn’t seem to demand much in the way of interpretation, except for what it means to “blaspheme” or what constitutes a “congregation”. In cases like that, maybe Bayle would have responded this way: the religious authorities should have assumed God was talking to someone else, namely, the ancient Israelites.

That’s a point Spinoza made in his Theological-Political Treatise, first made public in 1677: 

But with regard to the ceremonial observances which were ordained in the Old Testament for the Hebrews only, … it is evident that they formed no part of the Divine law, and had nothing to do with blessedness and virtue, but had reference only to the election of the Hebrews, that is, … to their temporal bodily happiness and the tranquility of their kingdom, and that therefore they were only valid while that kingdom lasted. 

When others are speaking, it’s presumptuous to assume that you’re part of the conversation! A generalization like “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God” may apply to all rich men (and even rich women), but when God said unto Moses: “Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and Israel”, it doesn’t seem he was talking to the rest of us. Assuming that you’re going to give any credence at all to the words attributed to God or Jesus in the Bible, why further assume that when God commanded Moses or when Jesus said “compel them to come in”, they were giving instructions to you?

Here’s a bit more about Pierre Bayle (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):

His life was devoted entirely to scholarship, and his erudition was second to none in his, or perhaps any, period. Although much of what he wrote was embedded in technical religious issues, for a century he was one of the most widely read philosophers. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique was the single most popular work of the eighteenth century. The content of this huge and strange, yet fascinating work is difficult to describe: history, literary criticism, theology, obscenity, in addition to philosophical treatments of toleration, the problem of evil, epistemological questions, and much more… Said Voltaire: “the greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote, Bayle, great and wise, all systems overthrows.”