Question

WRITE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS DISCUSSION

To be honest, my mind is quite boggled at the amount of reading in regard to this week's post. This case was quite interesting on the other hand, as I had never known a company to use the 1st Amendment in order to quit paying for the contraceptives solely based on their religious beliefs.

With the ruling that corporations were persons under the law showed that there can be areas in which corporations that are not publicly traded can have the same rights as individuals. This helps to delineate confusion in what Hobby Lobby had to provide it's employees. By the supreme court ruling that they were, if fact, considered to be a person, they determined that the government had substantially burdened freedoms of religion of certain corporations. The court ruling was only 5-4 which shows that decisions in the Supreme Court are not easy, or taken lightly. there was strong opposition to this ruling by the other members of the Supreme Court.

With Hobby Lobby being considered "closely-held", this meant that they were not publicly traded on the stock market. I believe from the case that this made a huge argument and the fact that they won the case. Many did argue however that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was interpreted too broadly, which in turn led to the ruling being in the favor of Hobby Lobby. I believe, that if it were a publicly traded company, the ruling would have went the other way, as that seemed to be a lot of the talk from a few of the Supreme Court Justices. In my opinion, I believe every corporation should be held to the same stand as each other, because if you are making a profit and hiring employees, each company should have to provide the same benefits to their employees no matter the owners' perspective to their religious beliefs.

To conclude my synopsis on the ruling and whether or not 1st Amendment rights should be used, I would have to disagree with the ruling and the fact of using the business owner(s)' personal beliefs. I do not think that an individual should be able to use this to their advantage in order to gain more profit be saving money from not providing resources to employees.

Answer 1

Answer: This post discusses about the case of an organization “Hobby Lobby” which has won a case in the Supreme Court based on their religious beliefs. The company took advantage of the 1^st amendment to stop making payment for the contraceptive to their employees. As per this post this is wrong as all the companies that are making profit by hiring employees should not attempt to save money by cutting down their employee benefits. I agree with this but the legislation cannot be overlooked and the companies have to follow them. The legal environment has a direct impact on the operations of the companies and no company or any other entity can provide it. At the same time the government needs to take measures and bring amendments for stopping the misuse of the laws by the companies. In this case it appears that by taking advantage of the ruling that the companies that were not publicly traded had the same rights as the individuals, Hobby Lobby managed to stop a benefit to its employees citing that it was against their religious view. I feel that companies have a moral and ethical duty for avoiding such steps. They should avoid taking wrong advantage of the legislation.