Margaret Bengs
On March 25, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that will determine whether the federal government can force family business owners to violate their religious beliefs or pay heavy fines.
In the case before the high court, arts-and-crafts retail chain Hobby Lobby and cabinet maker Conestoga Wood Specialties argue that a federal mandate under the Affordable Care Act forcing them to provide health insurance for contraceptive services including abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization that they oppose on religious grounds, or pay heavy fines, violates their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion and a 1993 law preserving that right. The Court’s ruling will impact businesses throughout California.
The core issue in this case is not about contraception or abortion. It is about religious freedom.
But “war on women” rhetoric is clouding the real issues in this case. False allegations are flying claiming that a win for the employers would limit women’s “access” to birth control.
The case is an attack on “freedom for women to access care,” U.S. Senator Patricia Murray (D-Wash.) recently charged on the Senate floor.
Balderdash. Nothing about this case curtails women’s birth control access or health choices. The question is whether business owners who object to certain contraceptive drugs and devices on religious grounds can be forced to provide them for free – not forbid women from obtaining them on their own.
Birth control is widely available through most insurance policies, many clinics and for a few dollars a month at the local Walgreen’s.
The government’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a 2010 report found that contraceptive use is “virtually universal among women of reproductive age,” with 99 percent of all women who are sexually active having used a contraceptive.
In fact, Hobby Lobby owners, David and Barbara Green, who started with a single store in 1970 and now employ more than 13,000 full-time employees in over 500 stores, including 23 in California, have no moral objection to providing 16 of the 20 FDA-approved contraceptives required by the mandate, and offer a number of birth control options in their own current insurance plan. But they object to Ella, Plan B, and two IUDs the mandate covers that can terminate a pregnancy, as this violates their faith. Is this unreasonable?
But that doesn’t stop the female victimization crowd from running a scare campaign. Murray has even gone so far as to say, “Allowing a woman’s boss to call the shots about her access to birth control should be inconceivable to all Americans in this day and age, and takes us back to a place in history when women had no voice or choice.”
The image of a suffragette marching – not for the right to vote – but for the right to free birth control doesn’t quite rise to the equivalent level of injustice. And apparently it’s OK with Murray that business owners including Mrs. Green who want to abide by their religious convictions have “no voice or choice.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has also joined the fray. Along with some of her colleagues she filed a brief against Hobby Lobby, charging that corporations are trying to impose their religious beliefs on their employees.
But employers are imposing nothing. It is the federal government that is imposing the mandate forcing people to act against their faith.
Pelosi’s brief argues that the mandate doesn’t amount to a “substantial burden” on their religious freedom rights because it doesn’t require employers “to administer or use the contraceptive methods to which they object.” As though employers are in the habit of handing out birth control pills in the front office, performing surgical sterilizations or fitting IUD’s.
“Rather,” the brief states, the ACA requires only that for-profit employers “provide comprehensive insurance coverage under which their employees may decide” which kind of contraceptive to use.
Employees may decide, but employers must pay – in violation of their beliefs.
If Hobby Lobby doesn’t comply with the mandate, it will be forced to pay $475 million a year in fines. If it drops its insurance, it will owe $26 million annually in penalties as well as be placed at a competitive disadvantage. The high court will decide whether this constitutes a “substantial burden” on their free exercise of religion rights in violation of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
This case has nothing to do with women’s equal access to health care. It’s about whether business owners have equal access to religious freedom.
(Margaret A. Bengs is a former speechwriter for Calif. Attorney General Dan Lungren and contributing columnist for the Sacramento Bee. Reach her at peggybengs@hotmail.com.)