Hobby Lobby and Mandatory Benefits

The Hobby Lobby case was an extravagant law suit.  Of course religious freedom should have won.  There should never have been any question.  The problem was not with Hobby Lobby, and it was certainly not about human rights.  The problem is with who carries the obligation to enforce those rights.

Consider how this would play out: The government decides to enforce the right to own property by putting businesses in charge of it.  Now, businesses are legally required to handle things like evictions and property deeds for their employees.  If an employee is robbed, the employer is required to investigate and bring the thief to justice.  Oh yeah, and this only applies to full time employees.

Now, considering the following: The government and the majority of Americans establish that adequate medical care is a fundamental human right.  The government comes up with a list of medical care related things that every person should have free access to.  Now, to enforce this the government does two things.  First, it puts enforcement in the charge of for-profit businesses.  Businesses are now required to provide their employees with the list of things that every person should have free access to.  Now, we cannot forget though, this only applies to full time employees.  The second thing the government does is to mandate that anyone who is not a full time employee must pay, out of their own pockets, for insurance.  This is great.  Now, the government says that adequate medical care is a fundamental human right, so we are forced to enforce this right ourselves on an individual basis.  That makes perfect sense.  Imagine if this was applied to freedom of speech.  If the government tries to shut us up, our only recourse is to fight the government as an individual.  Appealing to the law would not be an option, because it is our own problem, not the government's.  This applies equally to medical care.  The government is pretending to provide what has been established as a fundamental human right by saying that for-profit businesses and individuals have to enforce this right.

The Hobby Lobby case should not have been about religious freedom.  That should have been a given.  The Hobby Lobby case should have been about responsibility.  If the government is not responsible for enforcing human rights, then no one is.  Enforcing rights is the purpose of the government.  The reason health care has become a problem in the first place is that the existing system, including mandatory benefits and health insurance, is entirely inadequate.  Forcing people to subscribe to the current system can hardly be considered enforcing a fundamental human right to adequate medical care.  In fact, it is little more than another way for the government to control us and subject us.

The big problem with requiring businesses to enforce human rights is that it forces people to work for them.  This is a rather foul case of discrimination against freelancers and business owners.  Human rights do not just apply to those who work for someone else.  If something is a right, then, by definition, it applies to everybody.  Further, allowing businesses to get out of this obligation for part time employees is even worse discrimination against the poor.  Clearly, the American lower class does not have the right to adequate health care, based on the precedents set by the law.  This also gives businesses far too much power.  A business can decide who has the right to adequate medical care merely by setting schedules and employee classification.  If my employer does not like my religion, my political ideology, my race, or even my hair color, a simple reduction in hours can change my classification to part time, exempting me from the right to adequate medical care.  Even worse, now I am legally required to go buy insurance (which, just for the record, does not provide adequate medical care), even though my pay check just got substantially reduced.  Choosing who human rights apply to is not the responsibility of for-profit businesses.  In fact, even governments have no business discriminating in this area. 

Enforcement of human rights is the job of the government.  It is not the job of businesses, and it certainly is not the job of the individual.  If individuals have to enforce their own fundamental rights, then the government is obsolete.  A government that puts the burden of enforcing human rights on businesses and individuals is lazy and corrupt.  If adequate health care is truly a fundamental human right, the government needs to get off of its lazy butt and take care of the problem.  This is the government's job.  It is not the job of businesses or individuals.  Further, if adequate heath care is a human right, it should apply to everyone, not just those who work full time and not just those who are willing and can afford to buy into the system.

Hobby Lobby should never have needed to defend its religious rights.  The government never had any business placing the burden of providing a fundamental human right on the business in the first place.  There are certainly cases where religious freedom must be balanced with other human rights, but it was entirely wrong of the government to place Hobby Lobby, or any other business, in this position in the first place.  Not only could this pitting of religious freedom against the right to adequate health care have easily been avoided, it should have.  If the government had done the right thing in the first place, this issue would never have arisen.