RFRA Exemptions from the Contraception Mandate: An Unconstitutional Accommodation of Religion

Litigation surrounding use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to exempt employers from the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” is moving steadily towards resolution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Both opponents and supporters of the mandate, however, have overlooked the Establishment Clause limits on such exemptions. The heated religious-liberty rhetoric aimed at the mandate has obscured that RFRA is a “permissive” rather than “mandatory” accommodation of religion — a government concession to religious belief and practice that is not required by the Free Exercise Clause. Permissive accommodations must satisfy Establishment Clause constraints, notably the requirement that the accommodation not impose material burdens on third parties who do not believe or participate in the accommodated practice. While it is likely that RFRA facially complies with the Establishment Clause, it violates the Clause’s limits on permissive accommodation as applied to the mandate. RFRA exemptions from the mandate would deny the employees of an exempted employer their ACA entitlement to contraceptives without cost-sharing, forcing employees to purchase with their own money contraceptives and related services that would otherwise be available to them at no cost beyond their share of the healthcare insurance premium. Neither courts nor commentators seem aware that a line of permissive accommodation decisions prohibits shifting of material costs of accommodating anti-contraception beliefs from the employers who hold them to employees who do not. Many of the Court\u27s decisions under the Free Exercise Clause and Title VII also exhibit this concern with cost-shifting accommodations. Yet, one federal appellate court has already mistakenly dismissed this cost-shifting as irrelevant to the permissibility of RFRA exemptions from the mandate. The impermissibility of cost-shifting under the Establishment Clause is a threshold doctrine whose application is logically prior to all of the RFRA issues on which the courts are now focused: If RFRA exemptions from the mandate violate the Establishment Clause, then that is the end of RFRA exemptions, regardless of whether for-profit corporations are persons exercising religion, the mandate is a substantial burden on employers’ anti- contraception beliefs, or the mandate is not the least restrictive means of protecting a compelling government interest. Part I summarizes the legal mechanics of the mandate and briefly describes the three classes of anti-mandate plaintiffs — churches, religious nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses owned by anti-contraception believers. Part II details Establishment Clause doctrine that prohibits permissive accommodations that impose material burdens on third parties. Part III applies this rule to RFRA exemptions from the mandate, showing that the cost- shifting entailed by such exemptions violates the Establishment Clause. Part II also surveys free-exercise and Title VII decisions influenced by the same concern. We conclude that the existing regulatory regime that exempts churches, accommodates religious nonprofits, and leaves for-profit businesses subject to the mandate is the proper balance of private and government interests in the radically plural society that the United States has become