By Jeff Brumley, Associated Baptist Press, with Bob Allen & BJC staff reports
A federal appeals court heard oral arguments May 23 in retailer Hobby Lobby’s case challenging the health care law’s contraceptive mandate on religious freedom grounds.
A federal judge ruled in November 2012 that the company was not exempt from the provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requiring employer-provided health care plans to cover contraceptives.
Hobby Lobby CEO Steve Green, a Southern Baptist, and other members of the Green family filed one of approximately 40 lawsuits arguing that objecting businesses should be granted exemptions from certain provisions of the health care law just as religious nonprofits are granted exemptions.
Hobby Lobby and other critics of the law say it is wrong to force employers to help finance contraceptive services — including sterilization and the morning-after pill, among other services — when those products and services run counter to their principles of faith.
“They ought to be able — just like a church, just like a charity — to have the right to opt out of a provision that infringes on their religious beliefs,” Kyle Duncan, the Green family attorney who argued before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, told The Associated Press.
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the government’s position. The brief said it is unfair for Hobby Lobby’s owners to impose their own religious views on the company’s employees.
“[The] Plaintiffs have every right to refrain from using certain types of contraception and to attempt to persuade others from doing so,” the brief said. “But once they enter the secular market for labor to staff their secular, for-profit corporations, they may not force their religious choices on their employees.”
Hobby Lobby operates more than 500 arts-and-crafts stores in 41 states with around 13,200 employees.
From the June 2013 Report from the Capital. Click here for the next article.
