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The
Daily Signal
Obamacare
Anti-Conscience Mandate: Court Says Being Complicit in Sin Isn’t a
Sin
Elizabeth
Slattery
June
16, 2014
Last
week, in Michigan Catholic Conference v. Burwell, the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected the appeal of Catholic
nonprofit groups in their challenge to the Obamacare anti-conscience
mandate. The court got it wrong by second-guessing the religious
beliefs of these groups.
Formal
houses of worship and their integrated auxiliaries (e.g., church-run
soup kitchens) are exempt from this mandate—which requires
employers to pay for employee health insurance coverage that includes
contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs—and other
nonprofit religious employers are eligible for an “accommodation.”
Under the accommodation, employers must self-certify to a third-party
administrator that they have a religious objection to providing or
paying for certain drugs and devices, and this initiates the process
of the third-party administrator providing the mandated coverage to
their employees.
Some
of the plaintiffs in Michigan Catholic Conference challenged the
exemption for discriminating between types of religious institutions
in violation of the Establishment Clause. Others challenged the
accommodation, arguing that the act of self-certification
substantially burdens their exercise of religion in violation of the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the First Amendment
because it makes them complicit in an act that they consider to be a
grave violation of their beliefs.
RFRA
prohibits the government from substantially burdening free exercise
unless it can show that the burden is the least restrictive means of
furthering a compelling government interest. While the accommodation
supposedly protects religious employers from directly paying for the
services, these employers must still initiate and facilitate the
process whereby a third-party administrator obtains coverage for the
drugs and devices to which the employer objects.
In
essence, the accommodation shifts responsibility for purchasing
coverage away from the employers to administrators once the employers
provide the self-certification registering their objection...
Read
the rest of the article with links at The Daily Signal
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