Companies, the new Golem
In Citizen’s United, the Supreme Court awarded citizenship to corporations. Now, the same majority on the Court ruled that family-held companies, whatever the size, can have a religion.
The golem of the corporation as a person arises, one step at a time, from the nightmares of dystopic fiction into the Koch-fed reality of our purchased Congress.
It’s not just Hobby Lobby. It means that family-held Desseret (aka LDS) companies may apply their religious strictures on womens’ health to their religious doctrine. Scientologists owning business can refuse to pay for mental health care.
Jehova’s Witnesses? No surgery, blood transfusions, or any other invasive procedure for their employees. Charismatic Christian? Excellent: just prayer and the odd rattlesnake for you. Their employees don’t need no stinkin’ “modern” medicine.
This is a boon for insurance companies: the less they cover, the more they rake in. More irony: that’s something that President Obama counted on for insurance company support for the bill in the first place: requiring healthy younger folks to pay into a system to help those less healthy. So now insurance companies get money from the young, encourage smaller, closely held companies to “stand up for their religious principles,” and up the costs for healthcare a smidge because of “all the bureaucracy” with the law and its court-ordered complications. More than one someone is laughing themself into a cerebral hemorrhage — all the way to the bank.
Ironically, church-based hospitals can’t use the narrow Court ruling.
It’s a pity progressive religious such as those worshipping the Flying Spaghetti Monster can’t discriminate against deists: “No oxygen consumption allowed for our employees who believe in anything other than physics. And pirates. Arrrrrr, matey!”