Nearly a year after Hobby Lobby, contraceptive mandate still unresolved

The U.S. Supreme Court is in decision-making and opinion-writing mode now, having heard all oral arguments for the 2014-2015 term. Meanwhile, lower courts are still working out the implications of the decisions the high court made in its last term.

Not quite a year ago, on the last day of the term, the court announced its decision on Obamacare’s abortion-pill-and-birth-control mandate. Pro-life and religious-liberty advocates cheered a victory.

The Affordable Care Act requires employer health plans to offer free birth control and abortion pills. Employers with sincere religious beliefs against interfering with a fertilized egg object to paying for the drugs. They say the government is forcing them either to violate their conscience or to pay crippling fines that eventually would put them out of business.

Last summer, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties won an exemption from the requirement.

“The Supreme Court has decisively said that when you go into business in this country you do not give up your American right to freedom of conscience. This is a tremendous win today,” Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life said at the time.

But it hasn’t been quite that simple in practice.

About 105 lawsuitsare still pending against the mandate by non-profits, for-profits, universities, dioceses, religious charities, family businesses, and Bible-publishing companies, including 14 for-profit companies co-owned by women. The government has granted hundreds of exemptions from the mandate, but for only a tiny slice of the religious world.

“There are a lot of exemptions to the rule, including an exemption for churches. But for religious nonprofits like [Houston Baptist University] and [East Texas Baptist University] there’s no exemption,” said Diana Verm, an attorney with The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty who represents those two colleges.

Verm said the government-mandated dilemma for religious schools is an inconsistency. Government has exempted employers for economicorpolitical reasons from providing abortifacient drugs and contraceptives, but not for reasons of religious liberty. A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments for Houston Baptist and East Texas Baptist last month.

“The questions they asked showed they understand how important this ruling is to ETU/HBU and to their religious beliefs,” Verm said.

Morgan St. John, a student at Houston Baptist University, told me she sees the contraceptive mandate as an affront to her religious liberty.

“It’s an attack on the university’s mission … a mission that says Jesus Christ is Lord and that life begins at conception,” she said.

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