Whatever you think of the outcome, I think it was the pro-separation side that won today, right? This was a mandate by the government on a religious organization (in the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor). Or does “separation” only go one way, preventing religious organizations from directing government matters?
Depends on your feelings on whether religious organizations should be required to comply with neutral laws of general applicability, I suppose.
Which stems from the first causes, which is the way the separation of church and state is not separation of religion and state.
Nope. This was a religious organization claiming “We don’t like rule X, we don’t agree with it, it shouldn’t bind us” and it was nothing to do with their religious observances or the practice of their religion. It was a labor / public-health law. Letting religions opt out of labor laws because they don’t like them or find them contrary to their faith opens the door really wide for some abusive situations.
Oh ye of little faith. I’m sure there are many ways to subvert a public options to religious ends. One end of the politic spectrum is nothing if not possessed of a bottomless, petty and imaginative cruelty.
Your avatar is disingenuous. :)
This is equivalent to arguing that the prohibition against murder is a mandate on religious organizations. A broad law which applies to everyone and has no religious directive doesn’t target religious organizations.
Sharpe
4837
So the Trump tax returns cases will probably come out tomorrow and I’m going to try to my hand at a prediction:
I suspect the Court will “allow” Trump’s tax returns to be released but in such a way it probably will not actually happen until after the election. I think it’s unlikely that they will find a complete and total privilege or absolute immunity to fully protect Trump but they will almost certainly set some kind of “probable cause requirement” that Congress and/or New York State has to meet to get the records and as part of that they will almost certainly “remand” the case back down to the federal district court to “work out the details”. Working out these details will cost enough months to prevent any disclosure prior to the election.
That’s my guess. I could be wrong, but that’s my best assessment.
I’m all for the rule of law and oversight, but if the Court lets this shit fly and Biden wins, I hope he flips off every GOP request and points at the ruling.
Why the heck hasn’t someone hacked Deutsche Bank or the IRS to get those records? I mean everything else, including the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin, has been hacked.
Well, as I understand it, technically the case was that an executive order made the existing exception broader and clearer and some states sued to stop it. So this wasn’t a claim by the religious groups that any rule was bad. It was a question of whether the federal government could change the exception. (That’s from my cursory knowledge of the case–someone can correct me if that’s off.)
And anyway, your statement assumes that the original Obamacare rule wasn’t abuse in itself. If upheld as originally written, the best that could have happened for an organization like the Little Sisters of the Poor is that they would have to stop giving their employees health benefits. The worst was that they would shut down their ministry in the US. Paying for employees’ birth control was always out of the question for them; they just can’t cooperate in something the Catholic catechism calls “intrinsically evil.” (For the record, I don’t think a company like Hobby Lobby is in the same situation or necessarily justifies an exemption.)
That seems like a pretty silly comparison. This was not a prohibition, it was a mandate to pay for something. Anyway, a general-application law is obviously better than one intended to directly impact a religious group, but I’m pretty sure there’s a federal law that says that such rules need to not only be general and untargeted, but also have to take the least disruptive approach possible. (Ah, here it is. Sponsored by Chuck Schumer, no less!)
That’s the funny thing here: The exemption was worked and reworked to no substantial improvement (from the employers’ POV), but what they should have done was just had the government directly pay for the contraception in these few rare cases of Catholic or other religiously affiliated organizations.
Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to read the opinions, so I don’t know for sure if that RFRA law was part of the equation, but it seems like valid grounds to strike the mandate for an organization like the Little Sisters.
Timex
4841
The main problem I see with this decision, is that its essentially legalizing sexual discrimination. By allowing companies to carry insurance that does not provide coverage for contraceptive drugs, you are allowing a company to carry insurance which implicitly benefits men. Further, these drugs have other medical uses, besides simple contraception, generally related to hormonal balance. I know multiple women who have taken contraceptives specifically for that purpose.
To take a perhaps even more obviously offensive example, imagine if you believed that sickle cell anemia was caused directly by God, to punish shitty people, and that those people needed that punishment. So, you chose to have your company carry insurance that specifically did not cover drugs for treatment of sickle cell anemia.
The thing is, sickle cell is a disease that pretty much only affects black people. So the net effect is that your company is specifically carrying insurance that is worse for black people. There’s an implicit element of racism there, just like the carrying of insurance that does not provide for contraceptive drugs has an implicit element of sexism.
I find your priors lacking, sir.
Nah. They wouldn’t pay for contraception for men, either!
And in Timex’s example they wouldn’t be paying for sickle cell medication for white people either.
Wasn’t it the case (in the original challenge, some years ago) that the rule in question was that the Little Sisters of the Poor could opt out of the contraception requirement by simply asking to be let out of it (by filing a form), and it was the filing of the form that they found objectionable, even though it was the mechanism through which they registered their religious objection and got relief? It hardly seems like the way to describe that is that the best they could hope for is to cease giving health care benefits.
I don’t think the Little Sisters we’re objecting to being made to pay. They were objecting to being required to ask for the exemption from paying.
If checking a box on a form is an undue burden on the exercise of religion, then there is no such thing as a due burden on the exercise of religion.
In any event, the RFRA wasn’t a factor in the decision, though it certainly sounds like the majority were prepared to make it the issue if that’s what they needed to do to reach this decision.
Because the ACA provided a basis for both exemptions, the Court need not decide whether RFRA independently compelled the De- partments’ solution. However, the argument that the Departments could not consider RFRA at all is without merit. It is clear from the face of the statute that the contraceptive mandate is capable of violat- ing RFRA. The ACA does not explicitly exempt RFRA, and the regu- lations implementing the contraceptive mandate qualify as “Federal law” or “the implementation of [Federal] law” under RFRA. §2000bb– 3(a). Additionally, this Court stated in Hobby Lobby that the mandate violated RFRA as applied to entities with complicity-based objections. And both Hobby Lobby and Zubik instructed the Departments to con- sider RFRA going forward. Moreover, in light of the basic require- ments of the rulemaking process, the Departments’ failure to discuss RFRA at all when formulating their solution would make them sus- ceptible to claims that the rules were arbitrary and capricious for fail- ing to consider an important aspect of the problem.
Seems to me as a non-theologian that the doctrine of double effect applies here.
Indeed, the Little Sisters were not objecting to the mandate, they were objecting to the exception process:
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious order, runs over 25 homes for low-income elderly in the United States[7] and therefore is not automatically exempt from the contraceptive mandate. It objected to filing Form 700 because it believed that doing would make the order complicit in providing contraception, a sin under Catholic doctrine.
The first time around the Court punted the question, sending the matter back to the two parties to work out some accommodation which provided the exception for the Little Sisters. But if your view is that seeking an exemption to a rule makes you complicit in the purpose of that rule, there can be no accommodation you won’t object to. Is that a reasonable religious objection? Is filling out a form an undue burden? No, I don’t think so.
First case, Gorsuch writing the opinion:
McGirt v. Oklahoma: “Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.”
Wow.
Huge Wow. As an Oklahoman, I love this!
