According to the Obama administration’s Department of Justice, business owners in America no longer have religious freedom or rights of conscience in their business decisions if they conflict with present administration policies and programs.

From Breitbart.com:

The Department of Justice has responded to a lawsuit brought against the Obama administration by Hobby Lobby Stores, a Christian-owned, self-insured business that has argued that ObamaCare’s HHS mandate forces it “to violate their deeply held religious beliefs under threat of heavy fines, penalties, and lawsuits.”

In its brief, the DOJ responds that businesspersons have no constitutional rights to freedom of religion. From the brief:

“Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer, and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion. Even if a secular entity could exercise religion within the meaning of [Religious Freedom Restoration Act] RFRA, the preventive services coverage regulations still do not substantially burden the company’s or its owners’ exercise of religion for an independent reason: any burden caused by the regulations is simply too attenuated to qualify as a substantial burden.”

Notice that the administration goes beyond its argument that businesses have no religious freedom rights. The DOJ says that even if a business did have rights to religious freedom, the HHS mandate is not really a “substantial” ethical dilemma, and, in a sense, the government can decide what is a "substantial burden" and what is not.

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Response: According to the Obama DOJ brief, the administration has the power to decide what rights to religious freedom can be overridden by the government when it comes to businesses. A very dangerous precedent that needs to be dealt with and corrected by the courts.

For me, religious freedom is still the greatest issue of the current presidential election even if it has been substantially ignored by the two candidates and the main stream media. The Obama administration has shown that it has very little respect for religious freedom and rights of conscience if it conflicts with the administration agenda.

The reason for the Bill of Rights in the first place was to limit the government’s power in running rough shod over the rights of American citizens. Barack Obama has shown little respect for them in past academic legal discourses referring  to the Bill of Rights as ‘negative rights’ that sometimes stand in the way of implementing a progressive government agenda. The HHS mandate controversy shows the potential and the propensity of this administration to make policies that attempt to expand the government intrusion into the lives of Americans at the expense of their Constitutional rights.                 *Top

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