A tentative win for religious liberty in Obamacare lawsuit

[eomer]

18. There is a distinction you're missing between different types of religious organizations.

There is an exemption in the statute but it applies only to a narrow category of religious organizations. These appellants don't fall into that definition so the ACA statute would subject them to the contraception requirement, without exemption. The issues you're citing apply to the other religious organizations - the ones who are covered by the exemption in the ACA statute.

The reason these appellants originally sued, then, is because of the contraception requirement in the ACA statute (from which they have no exemption), based on the claim that it infringes a religious liberty that is protected under the First Amendment, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Their suit does not claim that the ACA statute granted them an exemption but rather the opposite - that it subjects them to the requirement, without exemption, and that such requirement violates certain religious liberties that they say come from the Constitution and the two other statutes I listed.

The question they put before the court - whether they do in fact have a protected liberty under the Constitution and those two other statutes - was not reached because HHS offered to make it a moot point by granting additional exemption that was never in the statute and never in the previous HHS regulations. This additional exemption is a widening of the definition so that religious colleges will now be, for the first time, exempted from the contraception requirement and therefore, due to this new exemption, the question is moot.