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Tag: religious freedom restoration act
Companies’ Pro-Equality Rhetoric Belied By Their Campaign Donations

Companies’ Pro-Equality Rhetoric Belied By Their Campaign Donations

Last week, corporate America appeared to take a rare stand on principle. After Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed a law permitting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, various companies expressed outrage and tried to position themselves as bold defenders of social justice.

There was just one little problem: Many of the same companies have been donating to the public officials who have long opposed the effort to outlaw such discrimination. That campaign cash has flowed to those politicians as they have very publicly led the fight against LGBT rights.

Pence provides a perfect example. During his congressional career, he led the GOP’s fight against a federal proposal to extend civil rights protections to LGBT people, arguing that they are not “entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws similar to those extended to women and ethnic minorities.” He also supported a ban on same-sex marriage, voted against the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and argued that legislation to prevent companies from discriminating against gay and lesbian employees would “wage war on the free exercise of religion in the workplace.”

In light of that record, his move as governor to sign Indiana’s so-called “religious freedom” bill permitting discrimination is not surprising. It is instead the culmination of his larger crusade waged over an entire career — one financed by many of the same companies now claiming they are outraged by the governor’s actions.

Take, for instance, Angie’s List. The company’s top executive, William Oesterle, was one of nine CEOs who signed an open letter to Pence demanding he revise the “religious freedom” legislation so that it does not allow discrimination. Oesterle also threatened to cancel plans for a $40 million expansion in Indianapolis if Indiana legislators did not change the law. “It’s very disappointing to us that it passed and was signed by the governor,” Oesterle said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Yet, Pence’s record didn’t stop Oesterle from giving $150,000 to his 2012 gubernatorial campaign.

Similarly, Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly’s CEO signed the letter bashing Pence’s bill, and a company spokesperson declared that “discriminatory legislation is bad for Indiana and for business.” But the company’s political action committee has given Pence’s congressional campaigns $50,200 and his gubernatorial campaign another $21,500. The latter contributions came after Eli Lilly publicly urged lawmakers to pass ENDA over the opposition of Pence and other Republicans.

In all, six of the nine corporate executives who signed the letter criticizing Pence’s legislation represent companies whose CEOs or political action committees donated to Pence while he was campaigning against LGBT rights.

Heather Cronk, co-director of the pro-equality group GetEQUAL, says the disconnect between the companies’ rhetoric and their campaign contributions is an illustrative example of hypocrisy.

“One of the key missing pieces in the conversation around Indiana’s (law) over the past two weeks has been the role of companies now slamming the bill in putting Gov. Pence in office to begin with,” she told International Business Times. “While it has been heartening to see companies defending fairness as a value,” Cronk said, the companies are “having their cake and eating it, too.”

Of course, many of the companies railing on Pence likely gave to him for reasons that had nothing to do with his position on discrimination — a lot of them probably donated because of his support for tax cuts, deregulation and other priorities on corporate America’s economic agenda. But that is hardly a valid excuse absolving those firms of their culpability in helping the fight against equality.

Perhaps more of those companies and others will now appreciate that truism — and better align their campaign donations with their purported anti-discrimination principles.

David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

AFP Photo/George Frey

Good People Sometimes Back Bad Laws

Good People Sometimes Back Bad Laws

A law in Indiana and a bill in Arkansas making life harder for their gay neighbors have lost their wheels in a surprising smashup. Business interests, usually associated with the conservative cause, lowered the boom on “religious freedom” legislation supported by social conservatives.

But we are not here to discuss the Republican rift between economic and religious conservatives. Today’s mission is to narrow the far wider gap between liberals and social conservatives. It’s to urge liberals holding the fervent belief in the right to same-sex marriage to give the other side a little space to evolve.

Condemning these traditionalists as base bigots is unproductive. Liberals might borrow the sentiment religious conservatives have often applied to homosexuality: Hate the sin, but love the sinner.

Such laws are indeed discriminatory, and nastiness may propel some of their supporters. But many of the backers, though they regard homosexuality as immoral, are not especially hostile toward gay people. Some have been genuinely shocked to hear that they would be considered unkind, unfriendly, and bigoted.

There’s a tendency in our culture to cluster in communities of like-minded people and throw lightning bolts of disapproval over the walls into other like-minded communities. But where possible, persuasion beats condemnation every time.

The train to legalized gay marriage is unstoppable, so let it continue rolling at a comfortable pace. When Massachusetts first permitted same-sex marriage in 2004, pollsters asked that state’s residents whether they defined marriage as something between a man and a woman. A majority said yes.

Most of the respondents’ answers in 2004 reflected not an animosity toward gay people but rather a traditional view of marriage. A poll asking the same question today would undoubtedly find a majority in Massachusetts saying “not necessarily.”

To my gay friends who regard the ability to marry another of the same sex as a basic human right, I hear you. But you must concede that the path for widespread legalization of same-sex marriage — starting in liberal places, such as Massachusetts, and then expanding one state at a time as more Americans became comfortable with the idea — has been quite effective.

To my liberal friends of whatever sexual orientation, you and social conservatives share a few areas of common interest. This is territory you can meet on if you don’t employ a scorched-earth policy every time you disagree.

The environment is one example. The Christian Coalition of America has fought efforts by fossil fuel interests and utilities to slap taxes on solar panels. In explaining its position, the coalition’s president wrote, “We recognize the Biblical mandate to care for God’s creation and protect our children’s future.” Whatever the hearer’s spiritual bent, those words are among the most beautiful statements of the environmentalist creed ever made.

White evangelicals may be more conservative on other issues than the population at large, but 64 percent told pollsters for LifeWay Research that they favor comprehensive immigration reform. Some of their church leaders have been among the most vocal proponents of a humanitarian approach to fixing the immigration laws.

The battle against casinos seems a lost cause, but Christian conservatives have led the good fight. Gambling as a means to raise government revenues is immoral, they say, and one reason is that it fleeces the most economically vulnerable members of the community.

What liberals and religious conservatives share is a belief that many of our most important values can’t be measured in dollars. One can’t paper over these groups’ divergent worldviews. But while their advocates might not expect to embrace very often, they should preserve enough common ground to hold hands once in a while.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Beacon Hill in Boston, moments after the Massachusetts Legislature voted to reject a constitutional amendment which would have prohibited same-sex marriage, 2007. (Tim Pierce via Flickr)

Toxic Law: How Corporate Power And ‘Religious Freedom’ Threaten Democracy

Toxic Law: How Corporate Power And ‘Religious Freedom’ Threaten Democracy

Corporations from Apple and Angie’s List to Walmart and Wells Fargo exercised their power last week against laws that give aid and comfort to bigots. But don’t be too quick to praise their actions.

Commendable as these corporate gestures were, they also illustrate how America is morphing from a democratic republic into a state where corporations set the political agenda, thanks to a major mistake by Democrats in Congress. What they did has resulted in Supreme Court decisions that would infuriate the framers of our Constitution.

The framers distrusted the corporate form. And they made plain their concerns about concentrations of economic power and resulting inequality, worrying that this would doom our experiment with self-governance. Surely they would be appalled at the exercise of corporate influence last week. For the companies opposing “religious freedom” laws in Arkansas and Indiana were concerned with human rights only in the context of profit maximization, which is what economic theory says corporations are about.

Where are the corporate actions against police violence? Or unequal enforcement of the tax laws, under which workers get fully taxed and corporations literally profit off the tax laws? Or gender pay discrimination? And when have you heard of corporations objecting to secret settlements in cases adjudicated in the taxpayer-financed courts, especially when those settlements unknowingly put others at risk?

The so-called religious freedom restoration statutes in Arkansas, Indiana and 18 other states reflect a growing misunderstanding of the reasons that American law allows corporations to exist, a misunderstanding that infects a majority on our Supreme Court.

Corporations, which have ancient roots, serve valuable purposes that tend to make all of us better off. We benefit from corporations, but they must be servants, not masters.

Confining corporations to the purposes of limiting liability and creating wealth is central to protecting our liberties, as none other than Adam Smith warned 239 years ago in The Wealth of Nations, the first book to explain market economics and capitalism.

There is no fundamental right to create, own or operate any business entity that is a separate person from its owners and managers. Corporations exist only at the grace of legislators.

But in 21st-century America, corporations are increasingly acquiring the rights of people, which is the product of an unfortunate 1993 law championed by Democrats that now helps bigots assert a Constitutional right to discriminate in the public square.

Concern about corporations and concentrated power that diminishes individual liberties has become increasingly relevant since 2005, when John Glover Roberts Jr. was sworn in as chief justice of the United States.

Roberts and other justices who assert a strong philosophical allegiance to the framers’ views have been expanding corporate power in ways that would shock the consciences of the founders — especially James Madison, the primary author of our Constitution, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited sums influencing elections in the Citizens United decision. Now, as a practical matter, no one can become a Democratic or Republican nominee for president without the support of corporate America.

And, central to the Arkansas and Indiana legislation, the Supreme Court last year imbued privately held corporations with religious rights in the Hobby Lobby case.

The Roberts court invented all of these rights. Principled conservatives should denounce such decisions as “judicial activism,” yet nary a word of such criticism appears in right-wing columns and opinion magazines.

Today’s corporations have their roots in ancient trusts created to protect widows and orphans who inherited property. Hammurabi’s Code provided for an early version of trusts. Later the Romans created proto-corporations to manage public property and the assets of those appointed to oversee the far realms of the empire.

Managers of these early corporations had very limited authority, what the law calls agency, over the assets entrusted to them. Today, corporate managers have vast powers to buy, sell and deploy the assets they manage. They can do anything that is legal and demonstrates reasonable judgment.

Spending money to elect politicians (or pass anti-consumer laws) is perfectly fine under current law if it advances the profit-making interests of the company. Last week, we saw companies denounce bigotry against LGBTQ people, but of course they did so in terms of protecting their profits.

Walmart, the nation’s largest employer, opposed signing the Arkansas bill into law: “Every day in our stores, we see firsthand the benefits diversity and inclusion have on our associates, customers and communities we serve.” Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.”

But creating efficient vehicles to create wealth by engaging in business does not require political powers, as none other than Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist noted in a dissent.

Where we have gone furthest astray under the Roberts court is in last year’s Hobby Lobby decision. It imbued privately held corporations with rights under the First Amendment, which says, in part, “Congress shall create no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Based on Hobby Lobby, both the Arkansas and Indiana laws were crafted to provide a defense for bigoted actions by businesses.

Yet laws requiring businesses to serve everyone, without regard to their identity, do not inhibit the free exercise of religion. A law that requires a florist or bakery to serve people in same-sex weddings as well as different-sex weddings may trouble the merchant, but it does not inhibit religious activity.

The corporate power on display in the so-called religious freedom restoration cases stems from a Supreme Court case that upheld the doctrine of laws of general applicability.

In 1990, the Supreme Court held that Oregon jobless benefits were properly denied to two Native Americans who worked at a drug rehab facility and who also, as part of their well-established religious practice, ingested peyote, a controlled substance.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who claims to follow the original intent of the Constitution’s drafters, wrote the opinion. He held that “the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability’” such as denying jobless benefits to drug users.

Scalia cited an 1879 Supreme Court ruling in a test case known as Reynolds in which a Brigham Young associate asserted that federal laws against polygamy interfered with the “free exercise” of the Mormon brand of Christianity.

In that case, as Scalia noted, the high court had rejected the claim that criminal laws against polygamy could not be constitutionally applied to those whose religion commanded the practice. “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself,” the conservative justice wrote.

Two years later, Congress undid that sound decision with passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a sloppily crafted bill introduced by then-Rep. Chuck Schumer (D- NY), and championed in the Senate by another Democrat, the late Ted Kennedy (D-MA).

It was this law, undoing Scalia’s sound Supreme Court decision, which enabled corporations to exercise their power for a particular cause that is in their interest, namely ending bigotry. Such actions may be laudable, yet still dangerous.

Corporations are valuable and useful vehicles for creating wealth. But they are not and never should be political and religious actors. As artificial “persons,” they should not be imbued with political or religious rights.

We need to keep corporations in their place. Otherwise, next time, their profit maximization may work against your liberties.

 

Will Hispanics Ever Love Republicans Back?

Will Hispanics Ever Love Republicans Back?

A new book of numbers by a Republican pollster doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges ahead for his party. Far from influencing politics at the margins, author Whit Ayres says current demographic trends are “changing results” in presidential elections and must be confronted.

Yet Ayres’ diagnoses and prescriptions raise a recurrent question for Republicans trying to map a way forward: In their emphasis on an inclusive tone and their confidence that Hispanics share their values, and in the absence of fundamental policy evolution, are they missing the point?

Ayres wrote his book 2016 and Beyond: How Republicans Can Elect a President in the New America for all White House aspirants in his party. He is advising freshman Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is expected to enter the 2016 race this month in Miami and comes pre-promoted by Ayres as “the most transformational” of the large, emerging GOP field.

Rubio is so talented as a politician, Ayres told me and other reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, that he recalls onetime basketball superstar Michael Jordan. “He could do things with a basketball that were not teachable and were just instinctively amazing,” Ayres said. “Marco Rubio is the Michael Jordan of American politics.”

He’s not just gifted, “he’s substantive,” Ayres said, pointing to Rubio speeches on how to energize the economy for the middle class, make higher education more affordable, and reform the tax code “to create greater opportunity.”

On top of all that, Rubio is young, Hispanic, and Spanish-speaking. He’s 43, and his parents were born in Cuba.

If Rubio has a chance to be transformational, it will be due to his generation, ethnicity, and skills. When it comes to substance, he has inarguably done a lot of thinking about today’s domestic and international problems. Yet many of his prescriptions are more traditional than transformative: He’s a hawk on foreign policy, highly critical of how the Obama administration is handling Iran, Cuba, and the Middle East. His tax plan relies on the conservative standby of huge cuts for the wealthy and the bipartisan penchant for running up deficits. Like the rest of his party, he is a vehement foe of the Affordable Care Act.

His big step outside the box was his key role in crafting a bipartisan immigration bill that passed the Senate 68-32 two years ago. But the GOP turned against its reforms, such as a lengthy path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Rubio now stresses border security and calls himself “realistic.”

Given his background and abilities, Rubio is an ideal purveyor of the Reaganesque message that Ayres rightly insists his party should adopt. The template is Ronald Reagan’s 1989 farewell address about a city teeming with people of all kinds, engaged in commerce and activity. And if the city had to have walls, the walls had gates, and the gates were open to all those with the will and the heart to get here,” as Ayres paraphrased it at the breakfast. “It’s that sort of inclusive message that built the last major Republican majority in this country, and it can do so again.”

Making that a reality, however, depends very much on appealing to Hispanics and young people, who have increasingly spurned GOP presidential candidates. The backlash over Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act underscores the youth disconnect. “This is where we’re headed as a country. A political candidate who is perceived as anti-gay at the presidential level will never connect with people under 30 years old,” Ayres said bluntly.

He was equally pointed about immigration. “If your position is that you want to deport 11 million Hispanics, then you’re going to find it very difficult to persuade Hispanic voters that ‘we want you in the Republican coalition,'” he said. That was pretty much Mitt Romney’s approach in 2012, and it netted him 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. As the white share of the electorate continues to shrink, Ayres and other GOP strategists say the 2016 nominee will need mid-40s support from Hispanics to win.

This is no slam dunk. Like many Republican strategists, Ayres contends that Hispanics are in tune with “the panoply” of core GOP values — “individual liberty, free enterprise, strong families, strong national defense, greater opportunity for all” — but election results and other indicators suggest the case is not so cut and dried. There’s also the question of whether any Republican can sustain an inclusive, tolerant message during a primary process influenced heavily in its first critical weeks and months by the party’s most conservative loyalists.

A nominee who managed to maintain such a Reaganesque tone throughout would be in relatively good shape for a general election. But that would still leave the problem of Reaganesque policies tailored to very different times.

Follow Jill Lawrence on Twitter @JillDLawrence. To find out more about Jill Lawrence and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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