Birth Control Continues to Bedevil the Supreme Court.by Linda Greenhouse
'Remember the debate over the Obama administration’s contraception mandate, the requirement for employer-provided health benefit plans to include free birth control coverage? You’d be forgiven if memory is hazy, because the controversy has seemed to sink beneath the waves following the Supreme Court’s unexpected, unsigned and unanimous seven-paragraph opinion on May 16 that essentially told the contending parties to go back and work it out themselves.
A short-handed court threw up its hands and put the best minimalist face it could on a dispute evidently beyond its institutional capacity to resolve. Although the outcome was ambiguous to say the least, the religious organizations that had sued for an exemption from the mandate were quick to declare victory. “Supreme Court rules unanimously in favor of Little Sisters,” proclaimed the website of Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of nuns who run nursing homes and were among dozens of religious groups that had joined the litigation campaign.
Not quite so fast — maybe. It’s just possible that the Supreme Court’s post-Scalia deadlock has given the administration the opportunity it needs to lift the verbal fog. What kind of compromise, if any, will these employers accept? The plaintiffs, nonprofit religious-oriented charities and religious colleges, argue that even notifying the government that they want the opt-out accommodation the administration has offered makes them complicit in the evil of birth control. Is there any area of workable compromise — a “least restrictive means,” in the words of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — by which women who work for these organizations can receive the same breadth of insurance coverage as all other women in the work force, while also enabling the employers to salve their consciences when their employees make use of the birth control benefit?'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/opinion/birth-control-continues-to-bedevil-the-supreme-court.html?
