SOTOMAYOR DIGS IN

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Many on the Left didn’t want any exemptions to the contraceptive mandate, even for purely sectarian groups. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, among others, considered that narrow exemption “itself a compromise.” The secularist central planners of Obamacare wanted total participation by all employers. They just couldn’t get away with it politically. So, naturally, they treat any objections from the religious to supposedly generous modifications of the mandate with the greatest impatience.

 

That impatience was on display in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent from the Supreme Court’s recent granting of a temporary reprieve to Wheaton College as its challenge to mandate-related regulations continues. Sotomayor felt the need to whip up a lengthy opinion to the reprieve, expressing exasperation with the Christian college for failing to appreciate sufficiently the Obama administration’s “accommodation” for religiously-affiliated groups.

 

The accommodation to which she refers came only after huge backlash to the announcement of the contraceptive mandate in 2012. Obama reluctantly directed HHS to modify the mandate for religiously-affiliated groups. HHS ultimately came up with a shell-game system for them. They could sign a form that theoretically transferred the costs of contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients to their insurers. Many of these groups and institutions, Wheaton among them, found the “revision” insultingly meaningless and continued to press lawsuits against the mandate. After all, under HHS’s cynical arrangement, they still had to find insurers to cover the morally objectionable products and they still had to participate in setting up payment for the products. The prospect of essentially enrolling their employees in a fictitious free contraceptives/abortifacients program didn’t appeal to them understandably.