OPINION: Recent Court Ruling on Contraception Mandate Shows America’s Priority of Business Over Religion
Nowadays summertime gives college students a new event, not unlike the Super Bowl, to look forward to: annual Supreme Court rulings and the social media rampage that follows.
Last summer saw the court ruling on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, a case over the ‘Obamacare’ mandate that requires businesses to include free contraceptive health care to female employees. The court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby and exempted closely-held, for-profit organizations—that’s law-speak for businesses owned privately by individuals involved in the running of the company—from having to provide contraceptive care.
Upon this ruling, opponents blasted social media with rants and quotes from Supreme Court Justice Ruth-Bader Ginsburg, while supporters fired back with praises of Hobby Lobby.
This summer saw the court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, which immediately led to another spike in political social media activity. Facebook profile pictures coated in rainbows, paragraph-long statuses of angry rants on either side of the discussion, and so on, littered news feeds.
The rise in social media use during these times has become so consistent, predictable, and packaged that I expect advertisers will be charged extra during June (when court rulings typically occur) of 2016, in light of the increased internet traffic. Perhaps companies will even sell pre-planned statuses and cover photos to Facebook users as if they were selling LSU National Championship t-shirts to rabid fans.
During all the court commotion this past summer, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals responded to a complaint of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic charity organization. They claimed the application process that religious non-profit organizations must go through in order to directly opt out of providing contraception is long, arduous and, in nature, infringing on the religious liberty of these organizations, because the opt-out requires free contraception for employees through a third party. Simply put, the Little Sisters wanted religious nonprofits to have the same exemptions as houses of worship, which do not need to opt out by the same lengthy application process or allow for third-party funding of free contraception.
The lower court, however, did not see the Little Sisters’ line of reasoning and threw out the complaint, solidifying the final regulations of the Contraception Mandate released on July 10. But the Little Sisters of the Poor and a larger coalition of faith-based organizations have not given up, and the fight will probably continue for some time.
This fight has seen little coverage, however, because it’s not ‘cool’ to talk about this, because it’s difficult to brand the fight of a bunch of old nuns against a boring application process into something marketable on Twitter.
The philosophical and legal debate of whether or not agreeing to allow third parties to pay for employees’ contraception is religious cooperation with something considered morally objectionable to the religious can’t be commodified into a rainbow logo, nor can its complex arguments be squeezed into 140 characters.
And if our generation cannot discuss an issue on social media, then how are we to discuss it? If a cause calls for something more than wearing a trendy t-shirt, then how can we support that cause?
Hobby Lobby, Facebook rants, rainbow logos, #LoveWins, quotes from Duck Dynasty’s Robertson family—all of it big business, intellectual commodity, capitalist product upon which we were raised. Our generation gets it.
On anything deeper, however, the nature of religious charities, spiritual conscience in the face of a changing culture, the role of religion in society beyond privately-held convictions, our generation is silent.
For that is something entirely foreign to us.