A Supreme Court Hijacking
As the government’s brief and Mr. Verrilli’s argument made perfectly clear, once the organization notifies the government of its religious objection to covering birth control, the coverage obligation passes to the organization’s insurance company without any cost to or further involvement by the employer. “Employers are not to bear any financial burden for the contraceptive coverage,” the solicitor general told the court.
.. What these organizations — colleges, charities and nursing homes that employ and serve people of all faiths — want is the complete exemption that the government has made available to actual churches.
.. It took Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only woman among the five Catholics on the court and the only one among them who doesn’t regularly attend Mass, to bring this case down to earth, slyly suggesting that the plaintiffs didn’t trust their female employees to refrain from using birth control. “Why don’t we assume that if the majority are part of the religion, that they are not going to buy contraceptives?” she asked Mr. Francisco. “That’s their religious tenet. And so, why are we worried about this case at all?”
.. So the threshold question in the Zubik case is whether the religious nonprofits are substantially burdened by the requirement that they inform the government of their objection to covering contraception. Their claim is that as a matter of religious doctrine, informing the government is the first link in a chain of events that makes them complicit in the sin of contraception.
.. Both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. seemed to assume, against all evidence, that a new form of contraception-only insurance could magically come into existence and could adequately meet the needs of the women who work for the objecting employers.
.. because they are after bigger game: getting the Supreme Court to interpret the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to mean anything they say it means.