Political Quotes

“I rise to describe my concerns with the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling of the Hobby Lobby case and also to describe my support for the Murray-Udall legislation which I am cosponsoring and which we will act on later this week. First, just a word about one item in the case that is not my main concern but is worthy of a passing comment; that is, whether a corporation can have religious rights. Of course, individuals can have religious rights. Churches can have religious rights. Religiously affiliated organizations have religious rights. That has been recognized often. But do corporations have religious rights? I would argue that the Supreme Court's decision in Hobby Lobby that they do is sort of fundamentally at odds with what notion a corporation is. Corporations exist for many reasons, but fundamentally the core of a corporation is the creation of a fictional entity that is supposed to stand apart from the individual owners. That fictional entity has rights and responsibilities that are different than the rights and responsibilities of the owners. In fact, we create the corporate forum to protect the individual owners. The individual owners, once a corporate forum is created, as you know, are generally protected against legal liability. A corporation's actions, if they are illegal, can only be held against the corporation and except in very rare instances the individuals who own the corporation are free from the liability that might flow from a corporation's acts.…”