The post-
Hobby Lobby legal world is getting strange, with the one of the latest
challenge to Obamacare's contraception mandate being upheld on moral—not religious—grounds.
The case concerned a group called March for Life, which was formed after the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to abortion in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. The group, Monday's decision said, "is a nonprofit, nonreligious pro-life organization." […]
Judge Richard J. Leon of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the government's position [that the group "is not religious and is not a church"]. "This not only oversimplifies the issue—it misses the point entirely," Judge Leon wrote.
"The characteristic that warrants protection—an employment relationship based in part on a shared objection to abortifacients—is altogether separate from theism. Stated differently, what H.H.S. claims to be protecting is religious beliefs, when it actually is protecting a moral philosophy about the sanctity of life." [...]
Giving religious groups special treatment, Judge Leon wrote, amounts to "regulatory favoritism." Moral philosophy, he said, should be accorded the same treatment as religious belief.
Leon and March for Life are of course wrong on medical and scientific grounds, arguing that hormonal products, intrauterine devices and emergency contraceptives are all abortifacients. Medical science disagrees, which should make the issue moot. This isn't a Catholic institution that is opposing contraception on the grounds that they are opposed to birth control in general. It's much closer to the Hobby Lobby argument that personal faith and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (and the Supreme Court) said they could interfere in their employees' healthcare decisions. But it's still not
Hobby Lobby because the RFRA addresses religious, not moral, beliefs.
My moral philosophy says that an employer's ability to interfere in my personal life stops not just at my bedroom door, but the moment I step out of the workplace every day. Somehow I don't think Judge Leon would take that argument to heart in quite the same way.