In a recent letter to the editor regarding health care benefits and the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case, Carol Orr asks why critics of businesses that do not want to provide complete family planning services to women on religious grounds can’t simply tolerate the beliefs of some conservative Christians, who equate several forms of birth control with abortion.

Here’s my answer. Businesses like Hobby Lobby are not asking for tolerance. Tolerance is not trying to talk your boss out of religious beliefs different from your own.

Hobby Lobby wants something else. It is asking our country’s highest court for permission to force women employees to acquiesce to their bosses’ beliefs. It is asking women employees to give up their constitutional rights under the First Amendment to worship as they choose, or not at all. It is asking women to surrender their Fourth Amendment right to equal protection under the law, in this case the Affordable Care Act.

It’s a clash of competing rights that Hobby Lobby should lose.

Regarding the First Amendment, Thomas Jefferson wrote that it allowed for “building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

In Reynolds v. United States (1878), the Supreme Court built that wall squarely between religious thought and religious action. Government can’t control religious thought but is free to limit those religious actions “which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.” Consequently, religious groups that believe in faith healing can be compelled to seek medical aid for sick children. And government can ban religion-based discrimination.

In the book of Matthew in the Christian Bible, Jesus put it another way, saying, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Jesus advised Jewish leaders that being a person of faith does not exempt you from civil law.

In a multi-theistic republic like the United States, one form of religion cannot be allowed to force its beliefs on others. And that’s exactly what Hobby Lobby hopes to do. It wants to create a separate, lesser health care standard for women who work for anti-abortion employers.

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954) the Supreme Court held that separate standards in education, based on race, were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. In parallel logic, the court should find a separate health care standard that applies only to women and is based on their employer’s religion is an egregious violation of women’s rights.

So what’s the harm in employera refusing to pay for health care services they object to? Can’t women just look for a job elsewhere? Also in Brown, the court held that the constitutional wrong occurred the minute some states created an unequal educational system. It did not matter that parents were free to move. Likewise, it does not matter where women work.

Hobby Lobby supporters have not fully considered the ramifications of a victory. If they win, what is to stop an atheist from withholding any pay that might be used for religious purposes? Or a boss whose religion follows dress, grooming or dietary rules from doing the same, on the grounds they should not have to pay for anything that violates the employers’ views?

President Obama set the stage for this fight by granting religious exemptions to the ACA to church employers. He was wrong to do so. The constitutional harms are the same whether your boss follows a religion or leads one.

The Supreme Court justices should drop the curtain on Hobby Lobby’s attempt to force its religion on employees at the point of the pen that signs a paycheck.

— Lee Edlund lives in Bend.