The California Supreme Court, in a 6-1 decision, has ruled that Catholic Charities must provide contraceptives as part of medical benefits to their employees. Since the Catholic Church, which operates the charities, does not condone use of contraceptives, this is almost certainly a state interference in the mission of the Church. Certainly it creates a crisis of conscience for Catholic Charities, who must now choose between cancelling all employee prescription benefits, and facilitating what the Church regards as a sin.
The Court's reasoning is fairly simple: State law exempts only narrowly defined "religious employees" for the action of a 1999 law that requires all health plans to offer contraceptives, unless the organization meets all of the following:
The Women’s Contraceptive Equity Act (WCEA) attempts to circumvent this potentially substantial hurdle [the 1st Amendment] by creating a very narrow exemption for churches. But that begs an even more fundamental question: may the government determine what parts of bona fide religious organizations are religious and what parts are secular? And, in particular, may the government make such distinctions in order to infringe the religious freedom of that portion of the organization the government characterizes as secular? ...Doesn't Justice Brown know that in "opposing women's healthcare" she is just giving her opponents more ammuntion? Or is this just one of those rare political acts of integrity? I report, you decide.
Under venerable establishment clause precedent, however, the exemption itself is problematic. To put it bluntly, the government may generally separate the religious from the secular to decide how it will dispense its benefits, but it cannot parse a bona fide religious organization into “secular” and “religious” components solely to impose burdens on the secular portion....
The WCEA defines as religious only those organizations for which the inculcation of religious values is the sole purpose of the entity, that primarily employ only adherents of their own faith tradition, that primarily serve only people who share their religious tenets, and that qualify as nonprofit organizations described in section 6033(a)(2)(A)i or iii of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.
This is such a crabbed and constricted view of religion that it would define the ministry of Jesus Christ as a secular activity. The stinginess of the exemption makes the structure of the act all the more baffling. The mandate applies only to employers that provide prescription coverage. Thus, Catholic Charities can avoid the mandate by dropping the coverage. The state wants to make sure that women are not burdened more than others. Where employers cooperate, the WCEA will reduce the inequitable financial burden of healthcare for women. If religiously affiliated employers are serious about their objections, however, women who work for those employers could actually be worse off.