The Affordable Care Act’s mandate that employers have to provide health insurance that covers contraception to their employees violates the employers religious freedom, even if they don’t have to pay for it, a federal appeals court said on Thursday.
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The U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis upheld a lower court decision upholding the religious-based school’s refusal to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives known as morning-after drugs.
CNS global Ministries Inc. and Heartland Christian College.
The panel then applied the reasoning of that opinion to a second case, involving Dordt College of Iowa, and Cornerstone University, which is based in Michigan.
Many religious organizations, however, argue that they would still be complicit in supplying employees with birth control in violation of their beliefs.
Thursday’s decision, like most of the other appeals court rulings on the issue, involved only an interpretation of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not the Constitution.
The law allows religiously affiliated non-profit employers to opt out of paying for contraceptive coverage directly. All have religious objections to some of the contraceptives mandated by the ACA. A Kentucky county clerk was briefly jailed recently for declining to issue same-sex marriage licenses, citing her religious beliefs, following a June Supreme Court decision recognizing a constitutional right to gay marriage.
“The question here is not whether CNS and HCC have correctly interpreted the law, but whether they have a honest religious belief that their participation in the accommodation process makes them morally and spiritually complicit in providing abortifacient coverage”, wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Roger Wollman. Pitched as a boon for women’s health, the rules quickly spawned controversy, with dozens of religious nonprofits and devout business owners filing suit. Seven other circuit courts have ruled in similar cases, and all of them sided with the government. That raises the likelihood of the Supreme Court taking up the case to resolve the conflict. Already they have several appeals before them, including one from the Little Sisters of the Poor, which has as its advocate famed Supreme Court litigator Paul Clement.
The Obama administration now has the option of asking the full Eighth Circuit to rehear the cases en banc or to go, now or later, to the Supreme Court. At the end of the month, the justices will have their first meeting of the new term to consider cases to hear. Leslie Griffin, a professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas law school, pointed out that the 8th Circuit’s opinion relied on different reasoning than the other circuits.
Wollman said that there is no question that the fines imposed for failing to comply with the mandate would be a substantial burden on the groups and that the government did not meet its burden of proving there was no other way to meet its goal of providing women with contraceptive coverage.
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The U.S. Department of Justice previous year sought to have the joint lawsuit tossed out, calling it a meritless attempt to prevent female employees from obtaining coverage.
