IN 2012 THE SUPREME COURT UPHELD MOST of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature health-care reform law. That law requires that employer-sponsored health care policies include contraceptive coverage. This is in line with a 2002 EEOC ruling that companies that provide prescription benefits to their employees but not birth control violate Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination on grounds of sex. Although the Obama administration has exempted religiously affiliated nonprofit employers, such as Catholic charities, from financing contraceptive coverage, for-

profit companies remain bound by the requirement.

Two for-profit companies, however, are challenged the rule—Hobby Lobby Stores, an arts-and-crafts chain, and Conestoga Wood Specialities, which makes kitchen cabinet doors. Based on their Christian religious beliefs, the owners of the companies oppose certain forms of contraception, such as the morning-after pill and various intrauterine devices (IUDs).

That’s because they believe that life begins when the sperm fertilizes the egg and that these forms of contraception violate the right to life of the fertilized egg by preventing it from attaching to the lining of the uterus, thus making them equivalent to abortion.

In June 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit, upheld Hobby Lobby’s position. It ruled that a corporation, as a form of association, has a right to espouse its religious beliefs regardless of its profit-seeking status.

The Green family, who own the company, formed it with the “intent to provide goods and services while adhering to Christian standards as they see them, and they have made business decisions according to those standards.”

The Court continued:

Would an incorporated kosher butcher really have no claim to challenge a regulation mandating non-kosher butchering practices? . . . A religious individual may enter the for-profit realm intending to demonstrate to the marketplace that a corporation can succeed financially while adhering to religious values. As a court, we do not see how we can distinguish this form of evangelism from any other.

As the Court sees it, the owners of a company do not lose their right to follow their religious beliefs by incorporating, and it rejects the “notion that Free Exercise rights turn on Congress’s definition of ‘non-profit.’ ”

A month later, however, a different appellate court—the Third Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals—ruled against the Hahn family, who own.......

Discussion Questions 1. Although corporations are not human beings, they have a number of legal and political rights. Do they also have a First Amendment right that “Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise” of their religion? If so, was that right violated in this case?
2. Is it possible for corporations to have religious beliefs, or can only human beings have such beliefs? If corporations can be said to have religious beliefs, are those beliefs the same as the beliefs of the owners?
What if there is not a single owner, but a number of different stockholders? What about the religious beliefs of the managers or employees—are they relevant to determining what the corporation believes?
3. The Hahns have a right to exercise their religion. Does this right transfer to any corporations they own?
4. Are corporations “persons”? Do you think that Congress intended the RFRA to apply to corporations?
5. Does the requirement that their health care policies include contraception impose a “substantial burden”
on these companies’ exercise of religion? Explain why or why not.
6. Both companies are privately held, meaning that their shares do not trade on the stock market. Does this fact affect the issue? If so, how?