Here are a few of the things the Supreme Court’s ruling this week in the high-profile Hobby Lobby case won’t do:
It won’t keep any female employees of the arts-and-crafts chain from having access to subsidized birth control, because the company’s suit concerned only four of the 20 contraceptives mandated by Obamacare.
It won’t allow people of faith to skirt any law they deem burdensome to their consciences, because courts must also weigh the government’s interests and lawmakers’ ability to serve them in other ways.
And it won’t offer protection to Georgians if a state or local law tramples on their religious beliefs, because we lack a state version of the law on which the Hobby Lobby case hinged, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
In 1993, a Democrat-controlled Congress passed RFRA with only three dissenting votes. President Bill Clinton signed it. The bill was a response to an earlier Supreme Court decision that reduced the protection afforded to religious objectors — although even that lower level of protection was higher than a lot of critics of the Hobby Lobby decision would countenance today.
Since then, the high court has ruled RFRA doesn’t apply to state laws. But most states, either legislatively or through the courts, have adopted RFRA’s standard for protecting religious freedom.
Georgia hasn’t. Two legislators tried to do so during the 2014 session — and met the same kind of ill-informed backlash unleashed after the Hobby Lobby ruling.
“The idea that in the future, state government policy makers or local officials could infringe on the religious freedoms of Georgians and they would not have access to the same tools as (Hobby Lobby’s owners) did in this case,” explained one of those legislators, Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, “is just absurd to me.”
Certain aspects of the Hobby Lobby ruling could help dampen criticisms leveled at the bills introduced separately by McKoon and by Rep. Sam Teasley, R-Marietta.
For one, the ruling doesn’t apply to all corporations. Nor would a state version of RFRA allow employment discrimination on, say, the basis of race.
“The government has a compelling interest in providing an equal opportunity to participate in the workforce without regard to race, and prohibitions on racial discrimination are precisely tailored to achieve that critical goal,” reads the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito.
When his bill was under consideration back in February, Teasley told me enabling discrimination “couldn’t be further from my intent.” McKoon echoed that sentiment this week.
“I appreciate the fact that we now have something on the record from someone much more learned in the law than I (Alito) to back up the claims that Representative Teasley and I were both making,” McKoon said. “This law has never been used to justify an act of discrimination against a protected class.”
Astute readers will note that, in Georgia, gays and lesbians are not a protected class. McKoon reiterated, as has Teasley, that he is “interested in dialogue with any and all interested parties …. You can tweak some things (with legislative language) here and there, and if there are ways to further allay concerns, I’m willing to engage in that conversation.”
He added: “This is not about lashing out at any group; this is not about discriminatory behavior of any kind. This should not be a partisan issue. The protection of people of faith, it’s a foundational reason that America exists. … And I don’t want to see (legislative) language that has to be passed along a partisan divide.
“I would like us to be able to get to a point where Republicans and Democrats can get together and say, yes, religious freedom is a priority in Georgia.”
