Hobby Lobby was just their beginning.
After the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can have religion so that employers could opt out of providing insurance coverage for birth control to their employees, the administration attempted to
create yet another accommodation for religious organizations to comply with the law. These organizations have recently come to the conclusion that providing a health insurance plan that covers birth control is just too icky to accept (never mind that most health plans they carried before provided it). It's now one of the sources of evil in the world, or something, and they won't participate.
The new rewriting of the rules would extend the accommodation that religious non-profits got that would allow employees to obtain birth control directly from the insurance company to businesses. These employers can pass the cost of providing the birth control off onto the insurance companies. And to try to stave off the next round of legal challenges to the law, the administration also tweaked rules, taking on the responsibility of notifying insurers when an organization or business is exercising its religious objection. So all a group or business has to do is tell the government "we object" and the rest is taken care of.
Is that enough for these groups? Of course not.
In one prominent example, Ave Maria University filed a motion in a federal trial court in Florida earlier this month declaring the new rule to be unsatisfactory and sought an injunction before it takes effect on Nov. 1. The filing said that even though it no longer has to inform its insurer or third party administrator of its intentions, it remains opposed to notifying the administration of its desire to opt out because that would trigger a process by which the government requires insurers to pay for the contraception coverage, should the employee desire it.
"Ave Maria believes that any action 'specifically intended to prevent procreation'—including contraception and sterilization—is morally wrong," the Sept. 12 filing said. "Simply routing the form through HHS is a distinction without a difference. Indeed, HHS concedes that the augmented rule simply provides an 'alternative' that has the exact 'same' effect as before."
The "same" effect is an employee being able to obtain prescription birth control without additional costs—as the law stipulates. What the religious right really wants is for all of these groups to be treated as though they were churches, completely exempt from having anything at all to do with contraceptive covert. That was made clear by the Becket Fund, a conservative legal group that brought the
Hobby Lobby case and is defending Ave Maria and about 40 like-minded non-profits. In writing about another of its clients, the non-profit Little Sisters of the Poor, Becket says that the Little Sisters "should receive the same exemption churches do."
There is no accommodation to these groups that the administration can make that will satisfy beyond the total exemption actual churches receive. They will continue to challenge the law no matter what the administration does to try to appease them. So the only remaining question is whether the Supreme Court will allow any of these accommodations by the government to stand.