The Conscience of a Corporation

[Oldguy]

I've never thought of this angle to the Hobby Lobby/Obamacare issue and it's an intriguing one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/o...ted=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130211

One thing the author does not mention is this: If a corporation has the same religious liberty as an individual, what would prevent corporations owned by Muslim's from weaving their religious practice into their operations? Could a Muslim-owned corporation, for instance, institute some form of Sharia within itself and claim the religious liberty to do so?

As with so much of the religious liberty debate, nobody seems to be considering that what applies to Christian's must also apply to every other faith to be Constitutional. For instance, if we allow mandatory prayer in schools again, there is no Constitutional justification for denying ANY OTHER religion the right to lead school prayers too. The Hobby Lobby issue is the same.

We are entering new and dangerous territory here.

 

[OKTexas]

Who cares what Muslim companies do, if folks don't like it they are free to seek employment elsewhere. Just like Hobby Lobby.

 

[there4eyeM]

Who cares what Muslim companies do, if folks don't like it they are free to seek employment elsewhere. Just like Hobby Lobby.

And if the company is suddenly purchased by another with peculiar practices? Employment isn't always that easy to find. 'Free' can be like freedom for the slaves was; they were free to starve and be exploited because no functional choices existed.

It is quite easy to say 'they can just go work somewhere else' when there is no suggestion of where 'somewhere else' might be. Shouldn't employees have as much power to organize themselves as do owners of enterprises?

 

[JoeB131]

Or we can do the breathtakingly rational thing of just creating a single-payer universal coverage system like every other industrialized nation and get the employers out of it.

If you are going to make health care a form of compensation for labor, then it should be subject to fair labor practices. Just like Hobby Lobby can't pay their employees in money that can only be used in the company store, (an abuse that was common in the pre-union era) they can't pay them in a coverage that doesn't meet the federal standard.

Sounds simple enough to me.

 

[RosieS]

The most simple solution is to revert to common sense: only people are people; corporations are not people and do not share Constitutional rights.

Regards from Rosie

 

[Truthmatters]

corporations are run by people.

If those people are born here they are Americans then they get all the rights an American gets.

If you give them extra rights when they are part of the corporation then anyone who owns a corporation gets EXTRA rights non corporation owning dont get.


explain that

 

[there4eyeM]

Corporations are not and never were 'people'. I don't know where the idea came from, though Romney seems to have misunderstood the terms and thus promoted the fallacy. In legal terms, a corporation is a person, from the technical jargon of person and persons before the law. Persons that are living beings are not the same as persons that are virtual. Some rights and responsibilities are the same, and real persons (people) have other rights, like voting, that legal persons do not have.

 

[BillyV]

If government was not in the business of telling corporations what combination of wages and benefits they were required to provide, this would not even be an issue. This "problem" has been entirely manufactured by government interference. If an employee wants or needs access to the "morning after" pill or any other medical insurance product, nothing prevents them from purchasing a "contraception insurance" or "blood transfusion insurance" product, or any number of other gap coverages which I'm sure the industry would be happy to make available. This isn't about workplace rules or safety, it's a compensation issue.