The references to Barnett and Yoder are misplaced.  This case is closer to 
Bowen, Lee, and Lyng than to either of those cases.
In fact, Bowen, Lee, and Lyng cases are stronger for the believer, because the 
burden found to be insufficient in those cases is direct 
rather than indirect.


The notion that courts don't find "substantial burden," because they are 
rooting for the government, which is Doug's explanation,
is insupportable.  "Substantial burden" is a legal term of art, not a measure 
of how the believer feels about the burden.  The burden
here is incidental to their religious beliefs, not direct or substantial.  


But let's look at this issue from a broader perspective.  Do those favoring the 
employee here favor the following arguments as well?


Jehovahs Witness business owner should not have to pay for coverage of blood 
transfusions
Scientology business owner should not have to pay for coverage of mental health 
benefits
LDS business owner should not have to pay for coverage for treatments that 
include caffeine 
Evangelical or Catholic business owner should not have to pay for coverage of 
MS treatments derived from embryonic stem cell research


There is no principled way to distinguish these demands from the demands made 
in this case.  


I also would point out that Title VII forbids business owners from 
discriminating on the basis of religion.  Granting the business owner
the right to tailor medical care to his or her religious beliefs strikes me as 
an end run around that principle.   The work place is supposed
to be neutral as to religion.  When the employer can tailor benefits to fit 
religious viewpoint, he or she is gerrymandering the employment
market so that conservative Catholics are going to be more likely to want to 
work for conservative Catholics and non-Catholics are going to 
be more inclined to avoid conservative Catholic employers.  Can businesses 
create an employment universe where their owners impose
their religious beliefs on the terms of employment consistent with Title VII?


Marci






 
Marci A. Hamilton
Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Yeshiva University
55 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10003
(212) 790-0215
hamilto...@aol.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Marc DeGirolami <marc.degirol...@stjohns.edu>
To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics <religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu>
Sent: Sun, Sep 30, 2012 1:38 pm
Subject: RE: Court Rejects Religious Liberty Challenges To ACA Mandate



I wonder what sort of evidence Marty is looking for.  What arguments qualify as 
“serious” arguments?  And “serious” for whom?  A “serious” argument is not 
necessarily an argument that one finds persuasive, though that might be the 
standard.  It could instead be an argument that one disagrees with but that one 
finds plausible.  Or perhaps not outrageous.  Or is it instead one which the 
religious claimant takes “seriously,” even if the court does not?  How should 
one measure the standard for seriousness?
 
The standard that RFRA sets is not whether a court believes that the argument 
raised by the objecting religious claimant is “serious.”  It is whether the 
claimant has alleged a substantial burden.  Alleging a substantial burden does 
not require that the court gauge the seriousness of the objector, or his or her 
objection, or the degree to which the argument has achieved theological 
consensus, or its importance or centrality within the overarching system of 
belief.  It does not demand the assent of a selection of theologians.  After 
all, other theologians, at other conferences, surely would disagree with the 
conclusions of the theologians at Marty’s conference, but I take it that their 
feelings are also not the gauge by which we measure whether a burden is 
substantial. 
 
One possibility is to demand some sort of pain threshold, as the Missouri court 
intimates, going so far as to suggest (in what I believe is a misreading of 
Wisconsin v. Yoder) that suffering a substantial burden may even require a 
willingness to suffer criminal prosecution.  Putting aside the objection that 
there is of course a difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient 
condition, would the argument become a “serious” argument if the owner of the 
company would prefer to be prosecuted rather than to comply?  Or to prefer to 
pay a fine?  Or does the “seriousness” of the argument not depend at all on the 
degree of suffering that the claimant is willing to endure?
 
Marc
 

From: religionlaw-boun...@lists.ucla.edu 
[mailto:religionlaw-boun...@lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Marty Lederman
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2012 12:57 PM
To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics
Subject: Re: Court Rejects Religious Liberty Challenges To ACA Mandate

 
My post bounced, apparently because of the number of recipients!  Resending 
without so many cc's.  Sorry for any duplicate receipts.

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 12:52 PM, Marty Lederman <lederman.ma...@gmail.com> 
wrote:
For what it's worth, at our Georgetown Conference on this issue last week (a 
video of which should be posted soon), there appeared to be a great deal of 
skepticism among the Catholic theologians and other scholars present (some of 
whom I am copying here, along with some others at the conference) that where an 
employer provides employees with access to a health-insurance plan on 
compulsion of law; the services in question are part of the plan virtue of 
legal mandate; and the use of the plan to pay for any particular heath care 
service is entirely within the discretion of the employee and her physician, 
the employer does not thereby engage in material cooperation with evil just 
because some employees might choose to use the plan (unbeknownst to the 
employer) to subsidize the use of contraception.

I am hardly an expert in such questions of Catholic doctrine; but I, for one, 
have yet to see any serious argument from those objecting to the Rule that 
compliance would result in a violation of religious obligations on account of 
such "cooperation."  That doesn't mean there is no such argument out there, of 
course.  But I think it helps to explain in part why plaintiffs in most of 
these cases have thus far not articulated a theory of substantial burden based 
on cooperation-with-evil, and why some courts are so skeptical of the 
allegation of a substantial burden -- namely, that such arguments appear to 
prove far too much w/r/t an employer who does not raise a similar objection to 
the inevitable use of its salary payments and taxes (via the intervention of 
genuinely independent choice on the part of the state or other private parties) 
for numerous forms of conduct that the employer deems to be wrongful.

Doug (and others):  I would be extremely grateful for any citations to Jewish 
or other non-Catholic treatments of this issue of cooperation with evil, 
thanks. 

Mark S.:  You appear to place a good deal of stress on the fact that 
contraception is "specifically" mentioned in the health-insurance plans in 
question, whereas of course it is not "specifically" mentioned in the laws 
requiring employers to pay taxes and salaries, even though everyone knows that 
such taxes and salaries will be used in part to pay for contraception.  What 
difference does that specification make from a Catholic moral perspective?  To 
the extent you're suggesting that the inclusion of the words "contraceptive 
services" in the insurance plan might be understood by some observers to 
suggest the employer's own endorsement of contraception, I think that is 
unlikely:  After all, who reasonably thinks that any employer approves of all 
the myriad health-care services included in a health-insurance plan?  But in 
any event, an employer concerned about the prospect of such mistakenly 
attributed endorsement can tell its employees in no uncertain terms that the 
inclusion of contraception in the plan is required by law, and that the 
employer is morally opposed to such services and "specifically" discourages 
their use.

 

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Douglas Laycock <dlayc...@virginia.edu> wrote:
Mark references a long tradition of religious thought about cooperation with 
evil, and how close is too close --  a tradition that is found in both 
Christian and Jewish teachings (and probably other faiths too, but I know less 
about those).

This tradition was probably not explained to the court. It may or may not have 
made any difference. Judges have been attracted to no-burden holdings since 
RFRA was enacted, I think because it seems to make a hard case go away. They 
don't have to limit the reach of the government's program, they don't announce 
that some modest government interest is actually compelling, and they don't 
have to admit that they are letting the government trample on someone's 
religion.

Intense believers in these cases are often represented by intensely believing 
attorneys, and they too often treat the burden on religion as obvious, and do a 
lousy job of developing the issue. I don't know if that happened here, but I 
suspect that it did, and of course I don't know whether it would have mattered.

A substantial secular business as plaintiff likely affected the initial 
judicial reaction to this case. But the reasoning appears to be equally 
applicable to religious non-profits controlled by bishops or other religious 
authorities.



On Sat, 29 Sep 2012 22:36:44 -0700
 "Scarberry, Mark" <mark.scarbe...@pepperdine.edu> wrote:

>Of course there is a long history of careful, thoughtful moral analysis that 
>treats the directness of a person's involvement in an action as a key 
>indicator of  the person's moral responsibility for it. It is not 
>idiosyncratic at all for the employer to believe that he or she is being 
>coerced into violating religious conscience by being required specifically to 
>subsidize an activity that he or she believes is wrong, and, even worse, by 
>being required to agree specifically to subsidize that activity by entering 
>into a contract providing for it to be subsidized.

Douglas Laycock
Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Virginia Law School
580 Massie Road
Charlottesville, VA  22903
     434-243-8546

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