Sir Xsarus wrote:
right, and maybe you missed it, but I'm very clearly stating that I do not think this should be the case. As soon as you are interacting in a commercial setting with employers and customers you are not an individual with beliefs, but a business.
A business owned by a single person (or family) is the property of that person or family. There must be some limit to what the government can require you to do with your property, right? Does the fact that you own a home mean the government can force you to allow others to live there (there's a whole amendment to the constitution sayin that it can't btw). You're focusing on the idea that a publicly accessible business must comply with certain rules, and I agree with that, to a point. Discrimination against employees or customers, for example.
But I do believe that a business is still the property of the owner, and that the employer and employees enter into an agreement as part of the employment contract and ought to be as free as possible in that regard. Where the hell does the government come in requiring that the employer must give the employee something that perhaps neither of them want to be part of said contract? As I said earlier, for me, this is a broad freedom issue. The government shouldn't be involved in this at all. Period. Unfortunately, the SCOTUS already made a previous (IMO bad) ruling on this, and now is subjecting itself to a whole second wave of more specific cases which it could have avoided.
Quote:
I'm not using the word employer, because it falsely equates the people running a business with the business. You used this word on purpose for the very same reason.
I used the word employer because in this case we are directly dealing with an issue involving employment. Not customers. Not products. Not purchasing or selling. We're dealing with the agreement between the employee and the employer. Hence, "employer" is the better word.
Quote:
I'm trying to point out that the government has the authority to put in place regulations that control how a business is run. you may agree with certain regulations and disagree with other ones, but that doesn't invalidate the authority of the government in this situation. So it's nice that you have something against health care, but is pretty much irrelevant.
Sure. And if we were talking about regulating the byproducts of the industrial processes a business is involved in which may end out in the water table, or the chemical additives in food being served by a business, or the workplace conditions in the business, or any of a number of other things revolving around the concept of minimizing the
harmful conditions/results of operating a business, I'd be in full agreement with you. But in this case we're talking about requiring that an employer provide to an employee a specific set of benefits that the state thinks all employees should receive, even if neither the employer nor the employee want that benefit to be part of their employment contract. You just can't equate these two things. And yes, at the risk of being my usual conservative broken record, this is yet another case of the whole "positive versus negative rights" concept. As a conservative I believe there's a huge difference between preventing negative effects and requiring positive ones. Thus, it's reasonable to create regulations to reduce the potential for harmful health effects in a working environment but *not* reasonable to require that employers provide health benefits to employees.
To a liberal, both of those are regulations which improve the health of workers, and thus are the same. To a conservative, one of those limits harmful actions while the other mandates helpful action and are thus completely different. We just measure using a different yardstick is all. And to me, it's bad enough that we allow the government to mandate the benefits which must be included in an employment contract
at all and even worse to even contemplate doing so in a way that intentionally violates the employers religious beliefs. Also, I believe that had we made the correct decision in the first place (ie: don't do this at all), then the second case doesn't come up. We've put ourselves in the position of having to decide which religious beliefs are sufficient to warrant exception to the law and which aren't. A position I don't think any of us are comfortable with.
It would have been much better to simply reject the mandate in the first place.