As for the matter of means more tailored, the question answers itself – and points to the deeper malevolence at work here. If there was truly a “compelling” interest in supplying free contraceptives to all women in the country, then the government should rightly make that commitment and raise the money to pay for it, not assign the responsibility to employers, to meet a “compelling” interest of the community at their own private expense. The matter could be handled without troubling the Little Sisters of the Poor.
As the redoubtable Mark Rienzi remarked, if the aim of public policy was to diffuse contraceptives to the country, the Little Sisters of the Poor would be an implausible vehicle. And yet, it is strangely no longer enough, for “progressives,” that the program be funded by the government as a public commitment. For them, it is even more exquisite and morally necessary that it be used as a lever to force the recanting or humbling of those insufferably religious people who offer the most serious moral resistance to the program.
That enforcement has been interrupted for the moment. Thanks to the Court, it simply awaits a new Administration of the Left.
Hadley Arkes
TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2020