A win for women's autonomy in St. Louis

Last Friday's federal district court ruling in St. Louis is some much-needed good news for progressives: Judge Carol Jackson dismissed an employer's complaint against the Department of Health and Human Services to get relief from the HHS requirement that his company's employee health insurance cover contraception.  Jackson wrote that the law does not offer him a religion-based remedy if an employee uses her health insurance to get the pill or any other form of contraception any more than it would if she used her salary to buy the same thing.

I know it's naive to say it in light of all the new red-state laws projecting government directly into women's birth canals, but I can't believe these cave people still breathe.  In the world they want to make us inhabit, women should not be able to sleep with someone without risking pregnancy.  Otherwise, she is, to borrow the delicate diction by which Rush Limbaugh famously referred to Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke in March, a slut.

I would love to see that employer/plaintiff put on the stand and be forced to answer the question of whether he ever had sex without the intention or even the willingness to create and commit the rest of his life to a child.  If he says no, lock him up for perjury; if he says yes, spay him on the spot for the crime of contemptible hypocrisy.  Fair enough, right?

Women's reproductive rights is a critical campaign issue, one of too damn many that Jim Lehrer and President Obama both managed to let Romney slide on.  Romney is on video endorsing a range of retrograde right-wing assaults on women's reproductive rights: he would overturn Roe v. Wade, end funding for Planned Parenthood, criminalize abortion. 

And he picked a running mate who has gone further.  In light of his and Ryan's stated positions, Romney should have been asked -- and next time out he should be asked -- if he supports the spate of GOP state-level efforts to make abortion very hard to get and to shame, impede and harass women who actually get to the doctor's office. Biden better be ready to put it to Ryan next week. 

Can anyone doubt that Romney-Ryan would make attacks on abortion rights the second thing they would go after, right after Obamacare?   

This St. Louis District Court ruling is far from the last word on this -- the editorial notes that other cases are pending now.  This is the first battle in a war that will end up in front of a less-than-Supreme Court with five Catholic justices.

Speaking of which, did you hear who Scott Brown -- the self-styled champion of partisan ecumenism defending his seat from Lizzie Warren's challenge -- chose as the SCOTUS justice with whom he most closely resonates?

Apparently forgetting for a moment that he was not speaking to a Heritage Foundation meet-the-candidates tea party, Sen. Brown pulled Antonin Scalia out of his, um, hat.  In riotously transparent panic as soon as he heard the audience's gasping reaction, he did the beeep-beeeep-beeep backer-upper and allowed as how he also liked Kennedy a whole lot, and in fact he was a fan of Sotomayor as well! 

How much broader-minded can you get than that?!  Only the ultimate empty chest cavity of Mitt Romney himself is able to hold more disparate and contradictory simultaneous affinities in suspended dissonance than Scott Brown. 

Contraception and Religious Liberty

New York Times Editorial October 3, 2012

Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, prominent Republicans and other social conservatives have spent the past year making inflammatory allegations that an Obama administration rule requiring employer health plans to cover birth control without a co-pay tramples on religious freedom. An important federal court decision issued Friday rejected that attack as without foundation.

Judge Carol Jackson of Federal District Court, a George H.W. Bush appointee, dismissed the lawsuit filed against the administration brought by a mining company and its owner, who said that providing contraceptive coverage in the company health plan violated his personal religious views.

Judge Jackson, based in St. Louis, correctly pointed out that the rule exempts churches, mosques and other houses of worship. The mining company — a secular, for-profit employer — clearly does not qualify for that exemption or for the accommodation the administration is fashioning to relieve colleges, hospitals and other organizations with religious affiliations from having to provide contraceptive coverage directly, by putting the burden on insurance companies.

Her legal analysis, however, applies broadly, providing a useful framework for assessing claims by varied religious objectors.

The plaintiffs argued that the contraception mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 law that prohibits the federal government from taking actions that “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless that action advances a compelling government interest and is the “least restrictive means” of achieving it.

Judge Jackson said she did not have to address whether the act’s strict test should be applied in this case to a company because the contraception coverage requirement does not rise to the level of a “substantial” burden needed to trigger the law.

Any imposition on religion is trivial and remote, she explained. The health care coverage would offend the plaintiffs’ religious beliefs only if an employee “makes an independent decision to use the plan” to obtain contraceptives; and that independent decision is no different from an employee using part of a salary to pay for contraceptives, which clearly would not harm the employer’s right to free exercise of religion.

The 1993 statute “is not a means to force one’s religious practices upon others” and “does not protect against the slight burden on religious exercise that arises when one’s money circuitously flows to support the conduct of other free-exercise-wielding individuals who hold religious beliefs that differ from one’s own,” Judge Jackson wrote.

She also forcefully dismissed the claim that the contraceptive coverage requirement violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion. Her ruling accurately said the regulation is a “neutral” attempt to expand women’s access to health care and combat gender bias, and applies equally to all denominations. Under legal precedents, the First Amendment does not exempt individuals or entities from complying with neutral laws of general applicability based on a religious objection, however sincere.

Judge Jackson’s powerful ruling is a victory for women and religious freedom.

The many other courts hearing similar lawsuits by companies, individuals and groups with religious affiliations should follow her approach.