How Joe Biden Helped Make the Case Against Obamacare’s Contraceptive Requirement

When Solicitor
General Donald Verrilli stands before the U.S. Supreme Court

next month to defend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act against the charge that it violates religious freedom by
requiring employers to provide certain forms of birth control
coverage, the Obama administration will be facing a surprising
opponent in the case: former U.S. senator and current Vice
President Joe Biden. As Robert Barnes explains in The
Washington Post, then-Sen. Biden was one of many leading
Democrats to support the passage of the 1993 Religious Freedom
Restoration Act (RFRA), the very law now being used to challenge
Obamacare. Barnes writes:

When the RFRA was proposed, it had the support of the American
Civil Liberties Union and religious lobbyists, rolled through
Congress with near-unanimous support, and was happily signed by
President Bill Clinton.

Now it is at the center of challenges against the contraceptive
requirement. The Supreme Court next month will hear from
arts-and-crafts giant Hobby Lobby and a Pennsylvania cabinet-making
company named Conestoga Wood; owners of both enterprises say they
run their businesses to reflect their deeply held religious
beliefs.

The First Amendment holds that “Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion [the establishment clause]
nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof [the free-exercise
clause].” Against that backdrop, the cases raise important
questions of separation of church and state, equal treatment for
female workers, and whether corporations, a la Citizens United,
have a right of religious expression to which the RFRA applies.

Read the whole thing
here.

For a libertarian critique of the health care law’s birth
control requirement, see Jacob Sullum’s “Obamacare
and Contraception Exceptions.”