After Gaining Right To Free Speech, Corporations Could Get Right To Religious Freedom, Too

Reuters/Andrea Comas

The U.S. Supreme Court has already affirmed that corporations have free speech rights, but a new challenge to Obamacare could also declare that non-human businesses have a right to religious freedom.

America's highest court is expected to take up a fight soon over the hotly contested requirement in Obamacare that businesses pay for insurance that covers 100% of workers' birth control. Craft chain Hobby Lobby and at least 30 other for-profit companies with religious owners have filed lawsuits claiming the mandate violates their religious beliefs.

It might seem odd that a business would get to exercise its religious beliefs. But this is America, and corporations often get to be people, too.

In its bombshell Citizens United case of 2010, the high court found the Federal Elections Commission violated companies' right to engage in "political speech" by limiting the money they could spend promoting political candidates. That decision caused a lot of outrage but fell in line with a legal doctrine known as "corporate personhood" that says businesses have some of the same rights people do.

For their part, Hobby Lobby and the other businesses fighting the contraception mandate say it violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That act puts the kibosh on laws that put a big burden on people's religious beliefs or the beliefs of businesses, depending on how the Supreme Court rules.

The Supreme Court is expected to take up the new Obamacare fight because two appeals courts ruled in opposite ways on the birth control mandate issue. Philadelphia's federal appeals court ruled in July that "for-profit, secular corporations cannot engage in religious exercise." That court found there was a "total absence of caselaw" suggesting corporations had the right to religious freedom.

In that case, a Mennonite family named the Hahns who owned a company called Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. was fighting the contraception requirement. Here's what the court said:

We accept that the Hahns sincerely believe that the termination of a fertilized embryo constitutes an "intrinsic evil and a sin against God to which they are held accountable" ... and that it would be a sin to pay for or contribute to the use of contraceptives which may have such a result. We simply conclude that the law has long recognized the distinction between the owners of a corporation and the corporation itself.

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After Gaining Right To Free Speech, Corporations Could Get Right To Religious Freedom, Too