Questions - If Hobby Lobby and other companies gain religious exemption clause from regs and laws...
When can corporations or even municipalities claim similar religious exemptions to institute certain Sharia or Levitican Laws on their employees or citizens?
Where does the legal responsibility lie if someone is seriously impacted, financially ruined, or killed when a company or a municipality enforces their religious codes on non-believers who had the misfortune to think they were getting a good job or living in a good town or city, and these religious codes of conduct are implemented over their objections?
Are people supposed to "just quit" this religious company if they object to being forced to pray before work and meals? Do they "just move" out of the now "religious-tenets based" town or city that they had lived in if they are forced to cover their heads in public or face fines or can be denied service because they don't constantly show they believe the right way? Or do communities have the right to conduct pogroms or shunning, where if the religious leadership believes you aren't part of the community, you get driven out and forfeit any contractual protection you had been entitled to.
Where is the line of religious exemption drawn when it comes to equal representation and access under the law?
If an employer who's insurance policies provide access to medical procedures can decide what procedures that are critical to not only health and wellbeing, but financial security of their employee's personal households due to a "religious exemption", how different is that from a head of a religious household being allowed to abuse a spouse, sibling, or child for "disobedience" in accordance with a religious code so long is it does not create death or a permanent injury?
Do the rights of religious belief trump other legal and civil rights?
Can Hobby Lobby be sued if a wife who has been previously warned against becoming pregnant for health issues dies because she cannot get contraception or an abortion when she wants to for her own health?
Because they claim to follow their "Holy Book" as part of their business dealings over the Law or other secular Regulations, they want to be able to carry insurance to force taxpayers and employees to come up with more money to keep a fatally damaged fetus that is marginally viable alive until it's born and have both it and the parents suffer helplessly while it dies (telling the parents "praise be to the Lord who gifted you with that precious blessing"
, but they won't carry insurance that will allow the parents to end the already failed pregnancy with the least amount of cost, pain and suffering all around.
Can an employee (or former employee) sue for the hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to maintain a fetus that cannot survive long after birth and will die in agony after surviving at most a couple weeks after birth that the parents are forced by an employer like Hobby Lobby's "religious scruples" to carry to term? Can they include "Pain and Suffering?"
Does an employee who cannot get birth control sue for additional pay to support a child that the "rhythm method" cannot prevent or godly blessings has overwhelmed the family with?
Does Hobby Lobby really think that the only people who work for them will allow the company to tell the employees how they are supposed to live their lives? Or are they just looking for a reason to discriminate against and punish as many people they can who aren't as Christian as they are?
My comment is this -
If the corporate owners of Hobby Lobby are as "Christian" (well - Red Letter Christian, at least) and "Patriotic" as they claim to be, they would either opt to provide the insurance (which they claim as part of their Christian Duty to their employees), or pay the fine - which, BTW, would be cheaper than providing insurance - and provide the employees with assistance to purchase insurance on their own, serving both their God and the secular/religious rights under the ACA of their employees.
However, they choose not to, so that indicates what type of "Christian" they are. Frankly, the only difference between this type of "Christian" and the Taliban is that there are secular Laws that stand between them and their perceived Devils.
What the fundamentalist cannot, by the nature of "for God or against God" thinking cannot understand is that once they can subvert that despised secularism enough so those Laws fall, their own Devils will take over and everyone else that was protected by those Laws.
The reason for separation of Religion (God's Law) and State Law is to protect the Religious within a framework of equal protection -which includes protection from petty despots, cheats, and bullies within their religious organizations as well as from others who may want to take away their personal religious identity and rights.
Haele
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