Owners who have protected themselves from personal liability by forming corporations should not be allowed to "shield their companies from regulatory obligations based on alleged injuries to their individual religious beliefs," lawyers in Harris' office, representing California and 10 other states, told the court. The dispute before the Supreme Court "will help determine whether we will be a nation that is mutually accommodating of differences of conscience, or whether the increasingly powerful regulatory state is going to refuse to take account of differences of opinion and run roughshod over dissenters," said Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor, former federal appeals court judge and senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. The court almost always grants review to resolve a split in lower courts on the constitutionality of a federal law, and a cascade of voices - employers, the Obama administration, religious and civil rights groups, and state governments on both sides of the controversy - has called on the justices to step in. The same rationale doesn't necessarily apply to the contraceptive cases - for-profit companies do not have the same types of religious practices as individuals, and any concessions to the owners' objections to birth control would come at the expense of female employees. If corporations can deny birth-control coverage because of executives' religious views, California's lawyers told the court in an Oct. 21 filing, they could also withhold coverage for blood transfusions, end-of-life care, or medication with ingredients from cows or pigs - or ignore bans on religious or gender discrimination, child labor, and "countless other laws that govern modern society."
