The Supreme Court granted the Little Sisters of the Poor, and other religious organizations, a major victory today when they found against a contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare as its known.
The charity had been involved in court battles over the law for the last seven years.
Under Obamacare employers are mandated to provide employees with contraceptive health care coverage. Little Sisters of the Poor, a 150-year-old Catholic charity that cares for the old, said that mandate violated their deeply held religious beliefs. They sought an exemption from just that narrow mandate of the law.
The Trump administration granted those exemptions after they were refused by the Obama administration. The state of Pennsylvania then sued, claiming the Trump administration did not have the authority to do that and demanded the charity comply with the law.
The Supreme Court today, in a 7-2 decision, ruled in favor of the charity and the Trump administration.
The majority opinion was written by Justice Clarence Thomas. He wrote that the Trump administration’s exemptions were constitutional and hailed the work of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
“For over 150 years, the Little Sisters have engaged in faithful service and sacrifice, motivated by a religious calling to surrender all for the sake of their brother,” Thomas wrote. “But for the past seven years, they—like many other religious objectors who have participated in the litigation and rulemakings leading up to today’s decision— have had to fight for the ability to continue in their noble work without violating their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
He added: “We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption. We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects.”
The two dissenting votes on the decision were Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Photo by Little Sisters of the Poor