Clearing up confusion on court’s birth control ruling
WASHINGTON — Half-truths and spin from both political parties have quickly come to dominate the debate over the Supreme Court’s decision on religious exemptions to the rule on insurance plans covering contraceptives.
Both sides want to use the decision to motivate key blocs of voters in elections this fall — religious conservatives for the Republicans, unmarried women for the Democrats. In that battle, accuracy about legal issues takes a back seat. Herewith, an effort to sort out some often-repeated claims.
Q: Doesn’t the decision apply to only a few forms of contraception?
A: No. As with most political claims, this one, which has become a favorite talking point for conservatives, starts with a nugget of truth and rapidly moves beyond it. The accurate part is that the families who brought the cases to the high court, one of which owns the Hobby Lobby chain of stores while the other owns a woodworking business called Conestoga Wood Specialties, object to four contraceptive methods. They believe those four, intrauterine devices and so-called morning-after pills, cause abortions by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus.
But nothing in the court’s opinion limits the ruling only to those methods. Another person who owns a company could assert a religious objection to five or six or to all types of birth control. Those claims would be just as valid.
“It is not for us to say” that a litigant’s “religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court’s majority.
Q: How can the Supreme Court say that corporations are “persons” with rights?
A: On the left, the idea that “corporations are people,” as Mitt Romney once put it, generates outrage, but it’s hardly new.
What was new in this case was the question of whether for-profit corporations can assert rights under a 1993 federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The five justices in the majority said yes. Two justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, said no. Two others, Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, didn’t take a position because they felt it wasn’t necessary to address it.
Q: Doesn’t the ruling apply only to “closely held,” family-owned companies?
A: No. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga are closely held companies. But the opinion applies to all corporations. As a practical matter, as Alito noted, it’s not likely that publicly traded companies will have stockholders who agree sufficiently on religious matters to take a position on issues like birth control. But, if they did, nothing in the ruling would stop them from seeking an exemption.
Q: Will the decision deprive thousands of women of insurance coverage for birth control? A: Probably not. A key point for the justice with the swing vote in the case, Anthony Kennedy, was that the Obama administration already has an alternative way to provide insurance coverage to some women whose employers object to paying for birth control. That alternative should be extended to employees of companies like Hobby Lobby, he said.
Under the alternative plan, which currently covers religiously affiliated nonprofit employers, the employer certifies that it objects to paying for some or all birth control devices. At that point, the company’s insurer steps in and provides the same coverage free of charge.
Q: Isn’t that alternative process being challenged in court by some religious groups?
A: Yes, quite a few groups have challenged the administration’s plan. But Kennedy’s apparent endorsement of it seemed to telegraph that those challenges won’t succeed. But Thursday the court raised new doubts about how it would resolve those cases, granting a temporary injunction to a small evangelical college in Illinois that allowed the school to continue to resist the plan.
Q: Won’t the ruling allow religious claims for exemption from all sorts of other laws? A: Yes, but many of them won’t win. The court’s ruling will allow more companies to get their day in court to assert religious claims.
But the ruling doesn’t say religion holds a trump card that always wins. Instead, it says courts need to weigh how much of a burden a specific law puts on religious belief against the government’s need to achieve the law’s goals.
In this case, the majority said the balance went for the religious objectors, in part because the government, as Kennedy wrote, had another way to achieve its goal. Often, that may not be the case.