The owners of US chain of craft shops, Hobby Lobby, say they try and run their businesses along Christian lines. Their legal obligation, they say, to provide employees with health insurance that includes contraception cover, violates their religious freedom. And, in an important ruling this week the US Supreme Court this week agreed.
The scope of the ruling is disputed – the court majority insists it is specific and only applies to small, closely owned, largely family businesses. But for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, author of a strong minority dissent, it was "a decision of startling breadth" whose reasoning significantly expanded corporate rights.
The court, dominated by conservatives who relish their role as warriors in the US social and political culture wars, also used the constitution's free speech provisions and similar reasoning to expand corporate power in 2011 in a landmark judgment, Citizens United. Then they struck down election spending curbs as an infringement of corporate free speech, in so doing explicitly acknowledging that companies share the rights of individual citizens. And, again this week, the court, in balancing rights which it accepts – the right of women to access contraception, and that to freely exercise one's religion – decided to privilege the latter.
Bader Ginsburg attacked the majority opinion as a radical expansion of corporate rights, notably, for the first time, an extension of religious-freedom protections to “the commercial, profit-making world” that could apply to all corporations and to countless laws. A contraception coverage requirement, the minority argued, was vital to women’s health and reproductive freedom.
The argument over requiring employers, including church organisations , to provide such cover has been fought over between Democrats and Republicans in several recent elections – a poll last month by the Kaiser Foundation found 53 per cent of citizens in favour of such a requirement , regardless of whether it violates the owners’ religious beliefs.