After nearly 10 years of litigation, the Little Sisters of the Poor finally won in the Supreme Court on Wednesday — again. The ruling is essentially that the religious order can remain faithful to Catholic teaching without running afoul of the law.
The Little Sisters had asked for an exemption from an Obama-era mandate requiring employers to cover contraception in their employee healthcare plans. The use of contraception violates the religious order’s beliefs, the Little Sisters argued, so why should its members be forced financially to provide, or administratively to enable, something that undermines their faith?
In other words, the question before the court was this: Does the federal government have the right to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to abandon a tenet of their faith? Thankfully, the court ruled 7-2 in favor of the Little Sisters, upholding a 2017 executive order from President Trump stating that the Little Sisters are protected from “undue interference from the federal government.”
In the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the federal government has no right to “tell the plaintiffs that their beliefs are flawed.” Rather, the government must respect the Little Sisters’ beliefs and even protect them. That means carving out a religious exemption for those who conscientiously object to certain requirements.
The Trump administration did make that religious exemption, and it was procedurally sound, according to the court’s decision — much more sound, according to Thomas, than the Obama administration’s original contraceptive mandate, which circumvented the normal rule-making process entirely.
This is a win for the Little Sisters and for religious liberty. But it’s important to note that the ruling is much narrower than it might at first seem. The majority opinion allows for religious exemptions and even praises them as a necessary extension of religious liberty. But this ruling does not require religious exemptions. And it specifically states that future exemptions are still subject to the rule-making process outlined by the Administrative Procedures Act.
This means that religious exemptions and the groups that request them, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, could still be dragged back to court. Even with the religious exemption allowed by the court today, the Obama administration’s creation of a broader contraception mandate remains in place for future administrations to reinterpret.
In short, this ruling is important insofar as it limits the scope of an overreaching bureaucracy that is often hostile toward religious people. We’ll need more like it in the days to come.
