April 24, 2013 - LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

Steven J. Willis (University of Florida, Fredric G. Levin College of Law) has posted Taxes and Religion: The Hobby Lobby Contraceptive Cases. The abstract follows.

Beginning in 2013, the federal government mandates that general business corporations include contraceptive and early abortion coverage in employee health plans. Internal Revenue Code Section 4980D imposes a substantial excise tax on health plans violating the mandate. Indeed, for one company – Hobby Lobby – the expected annual tax is nearly one-half billion dollars. Dozens of “for profit” businesses have challenged the mandate on free exercise grounds, asserting claims under the First Amendment as well as under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

So far, courts have been reluctant to hold corporations have religious rights
of their own; as a result, standing of a corporation to assert the religious
beliefs and rights of owners has become the primary issue in the twenty-six
separate cases moving through the courts. Courts are split on whether to grant standing; however, a large majority has used a variation of relational or associational standing to grant preliminary injunctions against enforcement of the tax.

This article discusses the relationship of morality and religion to general
business corporations. It concludes that over the past few decades, movements for social justice and corporate social responsibility have intertwined business corporations and moral issues, blurring the line between religion and commerce. It also concludes that courts should permit associational standing for closely-held corporations – particularly those electing S status for tax purposes – if the owners have unanimous (or near-unanimous) beliefs.

This July, the University of Texas Press will publish Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws: From Islamic Empires to the Taliban by Shemeem Burney Abbas (SUNY Purchase). The publisher’s description follows.

Under the guise of Islamic law, the prophet Muhammad’s Islam, and the Qur’an, states such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh are using blasphemy laws to suppress freedom of speech. Yet the Prophet never tried or executed anyone for blasphemy, nor does the Qur’an authorize the practice. Asserting that blasphemy laws are neither Islamic nor Qur‘anic, Shemeem Burney Abbas traces the evolution of these laws from the Islamic empires that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the present-day Taliban. Her pathfinding study on the shari’a and gender demonstrates that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are the inventions of a military state that manipulates discourse in the name of Islam to exclude minorities, women, free thinkers, and even children from the rights of citizenship.

Abbas herself was persecuted under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, so she writes from both personal experience and years of scholarly study. Her analysis exposes the questionable motives behind Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which were resurrected during General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime of 1977–1988—motives that encompassed gaining geopolitical control of the region, including Afghanistan, in order to weaken the Soviet Union. Abbas argues that these laws created a state-sponsored “infidel” ideology that now affects global security as militant groups such as the Taliban justify violence against all “infidels” who do not subscribe to their interpretation of Islam. She builds a strong case for the suspension of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and for a return to the Prophet’s peaceful vision of social justice.