The “Freedom” for Bosses to Discriminate

As you may have heard, Hobby Lobby is suing the federal government because its owner believes that the HHS rule requiring health insurance coverage of birth control violates his religious freedom. There have been a whole series of reactions to the lawsuit, including one led by pastors protesting Hobby Lobby’s decision to sue. Then there’s The Oklahoman newspaper’s reaction, in which its editorial board recently came out in support of the owners’ lawsuit, calling it a “powerful voice in fight against Obamacare mandate.”

In the editorial, the board dismissed a point I had made to an Oklahoman reporter, where I explained that it is a slippery slope to allow employers to opt out of generally applicable rules because of his or her own moral or religious objection to such rules. While people may balk at the requirement to cover the “oh-so-controversial” health care item known as birth control, how would people feel if an employer refused to cover children immunizations?

Well, the editorial board took my point and said it supported theirs. They theorized that because people have the right to refuse a vaccine, bosses should have the right to refuse to cover vaccines in their company’s health insurance. And here is the impasse we are facing. While in my letter to the editor I noted “an important distinction between the right of someone to decide what her health care needs are and the right of an employer to restrict coverage of those health care needs,” the editorial simply equates the right to choose your health care decisions with the right for a boss to dictate if your health care decisions are right according to his belief.

For many employees, coverage of birth control in their health insurance plan can be the determining factor of whether they can access birth control. So whereas the boss’ right to religious freedom is not infringed upon by this rule (he can still go to church, advocate against birth control, not use birth control, etc.), the same cannot be said if he is allowed to “exercise” his religious liberty to deny his employees coverage of birth control.  His employees must live according to his religious beliefs, and not their own. Is this really religious liberty?

One lawsuit supporter responded to my LTE saying that the Hobby Lobby employees should have gotten jobs elsewhere because they knew what they were getting into when they signed up to be an employee at the store. Is this really the world we want to live in? Where all of those who oppose emergency contraception work at Hobby Lobby and everyone else works at Michael’s? Should we really start segregating ourselves like this?

Besides, why would someone going to work at a hobby store selling glue guns and knitting needles ever think that the store owner’s religious beliefs would be imposed on the 13,000+ employees to deny them access to health care that they would get if they worked at another hobby store? Is this really religious freedom or just plain ole’ discrimination? Stay tuned for more on this…