Here’s why the Little Sisters will lose (COMMENTARY)

(RNS) The Supreme Court will uphold the requirement that religious nonprofits sign a waiver to avoid paying for contraceptive services.

Mother Loraine, at the press conference after oral arguments at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Photo courtesy of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
Mother Loraine, at the press conference after oral arguments at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Photo courtesy of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

Mother Loraine, at the press conference after oral arguments at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Photo courtesy of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

(RNS) In the Supreme Court, that is. How do I know this? OK, let’s back up.

In the biggest decision of its 2013-2014 term, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that a for-profit corporation that objects to provisions of a federal law as impairing its religious freedom is entitled to an accommodation under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The case at hand involved the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that employee health insurance plans provide women with free contraceptive care.


Under rules developed by the Department of Health and Human Services, strictly religious organizations such as churches were exempted from the mandate. The idea was that women who worked for such organizations were likely to belong to the religious body in question and in any event could be expected to embrace or at least conform to its beliefs and practices.


READ: Pope moves the needle on global warming. A little.


By contrast, religiously affiliated nonprofits such as the University of Notre Dame and the Little Sisters of the Poor (an order of nuns that runs a couple of dozen nursing homes) received an accommodation, under which they are supposed to fill out a form for the government stating that they object to the contraception mandate. The government will then tell their insurance company to provide their women employees with the free coverage at the company’s expense. The idea is that employees of such nonprofits cannot be expected to hew to the religious principles of the religious body with which they are affiliated.

In the Hobby Lobby case, the court told the Obama administration to give a “closely held” for-profit that demonstrates a bona fide religious commitment the same accommodation the government provides to a religious nonprofit. In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito left open the question of whether the accommodation was itself sufficient. Faced with a difference of opinion at the appellate level, the court last Friday (Nov. 6) agreed to take up that question.

The Little Sisters, Notre Dame, et al. claim that filling out the government waiver makes them responsible for — or as Aristotle and Aquinas would have said, the final cause of — practices they find religiously intolerable. What they want is the complete exemption afforded to churches.


READ: Pew religion trends report is bad news for the GOP


They won’t get it.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act says that religious objections to a federal law can be overturned only if the government has a compelling interest in doing so. In the Hobby Lobby case, Justice Anthony Kennedy became the majority’s crucial fifth vote with the help of a concurrence declaring that indeed to be the case. “There are many medical conditions for which pregnancy is contraindicated,” Kennedy wrote. “It is important to confirm that a premise of the Court’s opinion is its assumption that the HHS regulation here at issue furthers a legitimate and compelling interest in the health of female employees.”

And the Kennedy concurrence finds the accommodation for religious nonprofits to be a valid means of reconciling that compelling interest with religious liberty: “In these cases the means to reconcile those two priorities are at hand in the existing accommodation the Government has designed, identified, and used for circumstances closely parallel to those presented here.”


Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is a contributing editor of the Religion News Service. Photo courtesy of Mark Silk

Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college’s Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is a contributing editor of the Religion News Service. Photo courtesy of Mark Silk

Just as Kennedy stuck with his earlier positions on gay rights and voted in favor of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage last June, so he will stick with these dicta and provide the crucial fifth vote to uphold the Obama administration’s non- (and for-) profit accommodation of the contraception mandate.

(Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college’s Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is a contributing editor of the Religion News Service.)

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!