This Is the Next Hobby Lobby
On July 3, a majority of Supreme Court justices apparently took that argument seriously, telling evangelical Wheaton College, one of the plaintiffs suing the government, that it didn’t have to sign the disputed opt-out form while the lawsuit proceeded. That infuriated the female justices, who pointed out that days earlier, in the Hobby Lobby decision, the majority had called that accommodation “a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations while ensuring that the employees of these entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage.”
The Hobby Lobby decision found that closely held companies with sincere religious beliefs could refuse to comply with the ACA’s contraception requirement. The majority relied on the existence of the accommodation as proof the government had other ways to provide contraception that didn’t, in their view, burden the companies’ religious liberty.
The ultimate question of the opt-out form won’t be settled until the Supreme Court gives it a proper hearing on the merits. For now, Miller is out of luck. The Notre Dame-affiliated insurance company refused to cover an IUD or its insertion, which together cost at least a thousand dollars.