Hobby Lobby will not lead us down a slippery slope of religious exemptions
Quit your hand-wringing, liberals
Don't panic, liberals. We are not about to tumble down the slippery slope of businesses claiming religious exemptions from every law they don't like. Far from it.
Inspiring the panic is this: The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that ObamaCare's employer health insurance mandate violated the religious liberty of Hobby Lobby's owners because it forced the craft store to offer employees insurance covering contraception that Hobby Lobby's owners had religious objections to. Officially, the ruling only exempts "closely-held" companies from the contraception requirement, though that describes the majority of companies in this country.
Liberal legal commentators have argued that the justices' reasoning generates a slippery slope. If Hobby Lobby can exempt itself from the contraception requirement, then surely businesses owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses can refuse insurance policies that cover blood transfusions. Businesses closely held by Jewish or Muslim owners should be able to refuse insurance policies that cover vaccines that use pork products in them. Business held by Christian Scientists should be able to opt out of providing health insurance altogether.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
And surely, the hand-wringers claim, there are problems beyond the narrow confines of health care. Muslim cab drivers have claimed, for instance, that requiring them to transport passengers carrying alcohol violates their religious beliefs. Rastafarians could have a claim for the religious infringement of marijuana laws. As Ian Millhiser points out, some Americans have claimed religious objections to laws against racial discrimination and gender discrimination, as well as objections to Social Security taxes and the minimum wage. If those who hold these beliefs are sincere, it’s hard to see why they should be required to follow the law, if you take the broad religious liberty reasoning of Hobby Lobby seriously.
Follow this logic even farther and things get even worse. A consistent application of the view that religious objections warrant exemptions to laws unravels governance altogether. Religions are comprehensive doctrines that touch on every part of life and existence. Most of the religious objections we see in the U.S. are narrowly confined to a small set of Christian sexual concerns. But religious beliefs also include divine rules about how to organize economies, families, social systems, penal systems, and even the state itself. If you allowed exemptions for anyone whose religious beliefs conflicted with the laws on these topics, the whole governing apparatus quickly falls apart.
For instance, there is a long-standing belief within some Christian communities that opposes all private property on the grounds that God made the entire world, it belongs to him, and he gave it to mankind to use in common. As P.J. Proudhon once pithily put it : "Who made the land? God. Then, proprietor, retire!" Should believers be allowed to ignore private property laws and conduct their life as if all the things of the Earth belonged to everyone collectively?
Of course not. And guess what? You don't need to worry that anything close to resembling this will happen as a result of the Hobby Lobby ruling.
If the Supreme Court consistently applied Hobby Lobby reasoning to all instances of religious objections, you would indeed see many of the absurd outcomes liberal commentators are warning of. But the Supreme Court won't consistently apply this reasoning. They will only apply it to a small set of topics important to America's Christian majority. And that's a key fact most everyone is overlooking.
The court is not a robotic applicator of consistent principles of law, especially in cases pertaining to constitutional abstractions like religious liberty or freedom of speech. Instead, the court changes case-by-case, depending upon the justices' personal preferences. For instance, the court refused to exempt peyote-smoking Native Americans from drug laws, but did extend various legal exemptions to homeschoolers, a predominately conservative Christian group. In practice, laws that run afoul of a narrow set of prominent and hot-button American Christian cultural views will risk one-off exemption carve-outs from the court's conservative majority. But very little else will get the same treatment.
Just because the straightforward logic of religious liberty exemptions supports certain frightening slippery slope conclusions doesn't mean that justices will follow this logic to its extreme ends. Claims for religious exemptions that don't have much social support and don't pull enough on the heart strings of the Supreme Court justices will get cast aside as insincere, or as clobbered by a compelling state interest.
As always, "religious liberty" will not, in practice, refer to the grandiose content-neutral concept people pretend it does, but to a small number of conservative Christian views regarding contemporary culture war topics.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Melting polar ice is messing with global timekeeping
Speed Read Ice loss caused by climate change is slowing the Earth's rotation
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
The Week contest: Stick guitar
Puzzles and Quizzes
By The Week US Published
-
'Sports executives ushered a fox into the henhouse'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
By Harold Maass, The Week US Published
-
Trump, billions richer, is selling Bibles
Speed Read The former president is hawking a $60 "God Bless the USA Bible"
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
The debate about Biden's age and mental fitness
In Depth Some critics argue Biden is too old to run again. Does the argument have merit?
By Grayson Quay Published
-
How would a second Trump presidency affect Britain?
Today's Big Question Re-election of Republican frontrunner could threaten UK security, warns former head of secret service
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published
-
'Rwanda plan is less a deterrent and more a bluff'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
By The Week UK Published
-
Henry Kissinger dies aged 100: a complicated legacy?
Talking Point Top US diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize winner remembered as both foreign policy genius and war criminal
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Last updated
-
Trump’s rhetoric: a shift to 'straight-up Nazi talk'
Why everyone's talking about Would-be president's sinister language is backed by an incendiary policy agenda, say commentators
By The Week UK Published
-
More covfefe: is the world ready for a second Donald Trump presidency?
Today's Big Question Republican's re-election would be a 'nightmare' scenario for Europe, Ukraine and the West
By Sorcha Bradley, The Week UK Published
-
Xi-Biden meeting: what's in it for both leaders?
Today's Big Question Two superpowers seek to stabilise relations amid global turmoil but core issues of security, trade and Taiwan remain
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published