Steve's point, I believe, was simply that there is no constitutional right to hold a particular job or conduct a particular business, or business at all. That has been settled for decades, has it not? Religious believers sometimes have to make life choices that are narrower than others might choose, because of their faith. Is the point here that there is a constitutional right to avoid making such choices?
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: Arthur Spitzer <artspit...@gmail.com> To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics <religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu> Sent: Sun, Sep 30, 2012 10:11 pm Subject: Re: Court Rejects Religious Liberty Challenges To ACA Mandate I find Steve Jamar's post ("No one needs to be an employer") puzzling. Could Congress enact a statute providing "observant Roman Catholics (or Moslems, or Jews, or Seventh Day Adventists, or Mormons) may not be employers"? Would such a statute be different, in its burden on such people, from a statute saying "all employers must do X, when X is something that observant Roman Catholics (or Moslems, or Jews, or Seventh Day Adventists, or Mormons) cannot do? I'm not saying such a statute would be unconstitutional. I'm just asking if the burden would be different. Art Spitzer On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 9:50 PM, Steven Jamar <stevenja...@gmail.com> wrote: How about an employer being exempt from buying insurance, but then paying a tax that goes into a pool for the government to buy group insurance for those employees. How is that substantively different from just requiring the insurance benefit in the first place? And yet this sort of tax seemed ok to Mark. I don't see how this really insulates the employer from the complicity in evil through paying for it. Is the "agreement" (coerced agreement is agreement?) that different? Isn't the proper agreement the one between the employer and society that lets the employer exploit the economic system and all of its supports in exchange for doing business within the rules of commerce to be followed by everyone? That agreement may be one with the devil, but no one is making the person agree to it. No one needs to be an employer. Steve -- Prof. Steven D. Jamar vox: 202-806-8017 Associate Director, Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice http://iipsj.org Howard University School of Law fax: 202-806-8567 http://iipsj.com/SDJ/ "The aim of education must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals who, however, see in the service to the community their highest life achievement." Albert Einstein _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others. _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
_______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.