Justices exempt college from contraceptive rule
WASHINGTON — A divided U.S. Supreme Court gave a small Christian college in Illinois a temporary exemption Thursday from the “contraceptive mandate” in President Barack Obama’s health care law, renewing questions about how the justices will handle religious requests to opt out of the rule.
On Monday, in its decision in the Hobby Lobby case, the court approved religious exemptions for companies with owners who have religious objections to certain forms of contraception. In their opinions, the justices spoke approvingly of a compromise position the adminis- tration had previously adopted that is designed to shield religiously affiliated nonprofit employers from paying directly for contraceptives.
The language in Monday’s 5-4 decision appeared to signal that the court would uphold the administ ration’s compromise, which has been challenged by dozens of religious colleges and charities.
But in Thursday’s order, the court granted Wheaton College, an evangelical Protestant liberal arts school west of Chicago, a temporary injunction allowing it to continue not to comply with the compromise rule.
The college, whose mission statement says it “serves Jesus Christ and advances His Kingdom through excellence in liberal arts and graduate programs,” says its religious precepts forbid it from paying for so-called morningafter pills.
College officials refused even to sign a government form noting their religious objection, saying that to do so would allow the school’s insurance carrier to provide the coverage on its own.
The court’s order means that for now, the school’s students and faculty and their dependents will not be able to use the college’s health plan to pay for those contraceptives.
The unsigned order prompted a sharply worded dissent from the court’s three female members, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.
“I disagree strongly with what the court has done,” Sotomayor wrote in a 16page dissent. Noting that the court had praised the administration’s position Monday but was allowing Wheaton to flout it on Thursday, she wrote that “those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today.
“I have deep respect for religious faith, for the important and selfless work performed by religious organizations and for the values of pluralism” protected by the Constitution, the dissent added. “But the Court’s grant of an injunction in this case allows Wheaton’s beliefs about the effect of its actions to trump the democratic interest in allowing the Government to enforce the law.”
Under the administration’s accommodation for church-related employers, religiously affiliated non-