"[I]f you read a newspaper to find out about the contraception mandate cases, you will read lies," attorney and conservative writer Gabriel Malor argued in his excellent March 24 piece for The Federalist, "Six Lies The Leftist Media Tells About The Contraception Mandate Cases." "The leftist papers do not mention the substantial monetary burden put on religious business owners to violate their consciences," Malor observed. "The papers do not mention that contraception was both inexpensive and widely available before the contraception mandate, and still is. The papers omit to mention that it isn’t the businesses who have radically changed, but the mandates from government."
That's all true, and the same can be said of the broadcast and cable news networks, but Malor's focus is on newspapers, which ostensibly are supposed to be more fact-dense and less prone to spin. Do yourself a favor and read Malor's analysis here. For my money, lie number four, "corporations cannot exercise religion" is the most rage-inducing of the lot which the liberal media are force-feeding Americans (emphasis mine):
This Sunday’s New York Times took a particularly harsh tone when criticizing businesses that operate according to their owners’ religious beliefs, claiming: “for-profit corporations are not ‘persons’ capable of prayer or other religious behavior, which is a quintessentially human activity.” Again, note the emphasis on “for-profit,” because it is indisputable that non-profit corporations are capable of “religious behavior.” Look no further than, say, my former employer the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa, which like all dioceses in the United States is legally organized in the corporate form.
As with speech rights, individuals do not give up their religious rights when they incorporate, for whatever purpose. In the Hobby Lobby case, where the organization’s mission statement explicitly included a charge to operate in accord with the owners’ religious faith, there can be no question that the corporation was intended to further the “quintessentially human activity” of religious behavior. It is astonishing that leftists cannot grasp the simple truth: corporations are made up of people.
Unlike Malor, I'm not so sure it's "astonishing" that liberals cannot grasp that corporations are comprised of people. They most certainly must know that to be the case, it's just that leftists simply don't care about safeguarding economic liberty from the grubby hands of big government, even when it's intertwined with civil liberties like speech and religious expression.
