When do the reli­gious rights of an orga­ni­za­tion over­ride the reli­gious rights of an indi­vid­ual? Does the health of an employee take sec­ond place to the reli­gious or polit­i­cal pref­er­ences of an employer? If cor­po­ra­tions are peo­ple for the pur­poses of polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions, are they also peo­ple for pur­poses of reli­gious observance?

A num­ber of Catholic orga­ni­za­tions are suing the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion over con­tra­cep­tion, claim­ing that new rules under the Afford­able Care Act vio­late the reli­gious rights of those orga­ni­za­tions. This is an exten­sion of the flap start­ing last Feb­ru­ary, when the Health and Human Ser­vices depart­ment pro­posed that employer-​​provided health care must cover con­tra­cep­tive ser­vices. The Catholic Church objected, insist­ing that pro­vid­ing such ser­vices is con­trary to Church doc­trine, and that, there­fore, Catholic orga­ni­za­tions which employ peo­ple must be exempted. This led to over­in­flated rhetoric from the right about the Administration’s “war on reli­gion.”

HHS responded with a com­pro­mise, requir­ing instead only that the insur­ance com­pa­nies, not the employ­ers, would be sub­ject to this rule. This would pro­vide proper and ade­quate health choices for women, while respect­ing the doc­tri­nal dic­tates of the Church. That wasn’t good enough for Catholic Bish­ops, though many other Catholic orga­ni­za­tions praised the move. The issue refuses to go away.

The cur­rent law­suit com­plains on behalf of Catholic orga­ni­za­tions that employ peo­ple and are self-​​insured. The HHS com­pro­mise doesn’t let the employer off the hook by shift­ing the respon­si­bil­ity to the insurer when the insurer and the employer are the same.

This raises a mul­ti­tude of ques­tions. Should a reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion be given the power to con­trol health pol­icy for the United States, a nation that has the sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State as a cen­ter­piece of its notion of free­dom? As recently as 1960, then-​​presidential-​​candidate John F. Kennedy, only the sec­ond Catholic to be nom­i­nated by a major party for the Pres­i­dency, had to deny that he’d allow the Pope to dic­tate Amer­i­can pol­icy. Bear in mind, it was con­ser­v­a­tives who wor­ried about this fifty years ago. They seem now to have lost their concern.

What of the idea that the rights of the Church — or, more pre­cisely, of spe­cific orga­ni­za­tions — are being vio­lated by this rule? It’s not clear whether employ­ers (which are, after all, legal cor­po­ra­tions) have reli­gious rights at all. Indi­vid­u­als cer­tainly do. The First Amend­ment pro­tects the right to “free exer­cise of reli­gion”. Does a require­ment to pro­vide a legal health­care ser­vice as part of an insur­ance pol­icy some­how pre­vent any­one from exer­cis­ing his or her reli­gion of choice?

The require­ment to offer this cov­er­age does not require any­one to take advan­tage of it. No indi­vid­ual is forced to do any­thing he or she has a moral objec­tion to doing. It would seem that offer­ing con­tra­cep­tive ser­vices puts the reli­gious deci­sion where it belongs — in the hands of the indi­vid­ual, who can make the eth­i­cal deci­sion whether to use those ser­vices. In con­trast, refus­ing to offer the option would seem to pre­vent the free deci­sions that are at the heart of reli­gious liberty.

The Catholic Church has a long his­tory of inter­fer­ing with the func­tion­ing of sec­u­lar gov­ern­ments, stretch­ing back to the con­ver­sion of Emperor Con­stan­tine the Great early in the fourth cen­tury. For much of the next mil­len­nium and a half, Catholi­cism and other fla­vors of Chris­tian­ity exerted a great deal of influ­ence on Euro­pean nations, cre­at­ing vir­tual (and often actual) theoc­ra­cies. Per­haps, were it not for Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s com­mit­ment to reli­gious free­dom, the con­cerns of Repub­li­cans in 1960 were not entirely out of place.

The war on reli­gious free­dom con­tin­ues to this day. Mitt Rom­ney, as recently as Feb­ru­ary of this year, crit­i­cized Pres­i­dent Obama of hav­ing a “sec­u­lar agenda”. Of course “sec­u­lar agenda” is another way of say­ing “sup­port for the First Amend­ment”, so it’s hard to take the accu­sa­tion as a Bad Thing. It will be inter­est­ing to see how this plays out in the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. It could be argued that Rom­ney needs to be care­ful about rais­ing reli­gious issues, since sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians may be uncom­fort­able with Mor­monism. He may there­fore allow sur­ro­gates to make the case, and pre­tend to disapprove.

What are your opin­ions? Should the Catholic Church have the power to alter fed­eral rules on insur­ance? Do the health and reli­gious rights of employ­ees take sec­ond place to the pow­ers of enor­mous cor­po­rate employ­ers? Do orga­ni­za­tions have “rights” which super­sede the health and moral lib­er­ties of indi­vid­u­als? And will Repub­li­cans make an effort to dem­a­gogue this issue in the com­ing cam­paign season?

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