Houston Baptist University on Wednesday turned to the U.S. Supreme Court in its battle to avoid providing employees with forms of contraception it finds morally objectionable.
The appeal of a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling was filed on behalf of the Houston university, East Texas Baptist University and the Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania by lawyers with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
The Press fills in some important details.
HBU’s is just one of many cases challenging the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate. Under the law, religious employers who object to some or all forms of birth control (HBU, for example, takes issue with some emergency contraception that it wrongly likens to abortion) can seek an exemption from the feds. Typically this just means filling out a form letting the feds know of your objection to birth control and naming the company that administers your employee health plan. The government then works separately with the insurance company to make sure workers can get birth control coverage on another health plan if they want it.
East Texas Baptist University and Westminster Theological Seminary joined HBU in challenging the mandate. The schools have argued that by simply informing the feds of their objection – either by filling out a form or by some other means – they’re triggering or facilitating birth control coverage in violation of their religious beliefs. In their challenge, they’ve cited the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which says the federal government can’t, except in limited circumstances, “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.”
That the Fifth Circuit didn’t buy that argument is notable for a couple of reasons. First, every single federal appeals court that’s so far considered the issue has ruled that religious nonprofits can’t block their workers from getting coverage for birth control. Secondly, the Fifth Circuit, as we’ve written before, is perhaps the most conservative federal appeals court in the country. If anyone was going to buck the trend in favor of religious institutions, you’d have thought it would be the Fifth.
See here and here for some background. Basically, this is about employers attempting to control how their employees are spending their money, based on their belief in a demonstrable falsehood than none of them even gave a thought about as recently as a couple of years ago. But hey, religious freedom! Obamacare oppression! We’ll move to Irion County if we have to! You get the idea.