The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear the arguments of religious colleges and other faith-based nonprofit organizations against the contraceptive mandate of President Obama’s signature health-care law, the Associated Press reported.
The Obama administration’s requirement that employers provide access to contraceptives has been deeply controversial among faith-based organizations. They argue that the rule violates their religious beliefs. The administration has tried several times to accommodate those objections, though the efforts have failed to satisfy religious groups, and many of them have sued over the rule.
Last year the government told such organizations that they could notify the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that they object to providing access to contraceptives, and that the department would then tell the groups’ insurers that they must provide such coverage. But the faith-based groups asserted that giving the department such notice still violated their beliefs.
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the objections to the government’s scheme follows the court’s 2014 ruling in a similar case that involved the objections of private for-profit companies, rather than those of nonprofit groups. The court’s 5-to-4 decision in the so-called Hobby Lobby case said that the government’s contraceptive rule, as applied to such corporations, violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
