A United States District Court has granted a temporary emergency motion to the business owned by Tom Monaghan. He is the former owner of Domino’s Pizza. The injunction is not for the pizza chain, but is for his office park. This halts his requirement to adhere to the birth control mandate until his case makes it through all the courts.
In 2012, Tom Monaghan, (former owner of Domino’s Pizza), sued the federal government over the birth control mandate. According to the Christian Science Monitor Tom Monaghan is Catholic, and feels that contraception isn’t health care but a “gravely immoral” practice.
He felt that complying with the health reform law, and offering his workers a health plan that included coverage for contraception went against his own, personal, religious beliefs and that doing so would violate his rights. So, he sued.
It is worth pointing out that Tom Monaghan is no longer the owner of Domino’s Pizza. He sold the pizza company in 1998, and has absolutely nothing to do with it anymore. The lawsuit he filed was in regards to Domino’s Farms Corp., an office complex that he owns. I think that most people who hear about Tom Monaghan’s lawsuit will not differentiate between his office complex and the pizza chain that has a very similar name.
U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence P Zatkoff has granted an emergency motion that temporarily halts the enforcement of the federal Health and Human Service law that Tom Monaghan personally disagrees with.
This decision means that Tom Monaghan will be legally allowed to exclude coverage for birth control from the employer sponsored health plans that workers at Domino’s Farms Corp., receive as a job benefit. It also means that, for now, he also will not have to pay the fines that would normally be imposed upon for-profit businesses who choose not to comply with the birth control mandate.
This temporary halt will stay in place until the cases that have been filed regarding the birth control mandate make their way through the court system. The Detroit News explains it well:
If any of the courts rule the preventative care provision in the federal health care act is unconstitutional, it would not eliminate the law, but force Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to retool it.
There are a total of 11 lawsuits that have been filed by religious business owners who feel that providing coverage for contraception in employer sponsored health plans violates the religious beliefs of the business owners. The businesses are for-profit and are not places of worship. These lawsuits do not take into consideration the religious beliefs (or lack thereof) of the employees who would be covered by the health plans.
Image by Brian Turner on Flickr