WASHINGTON (ABP) — On the first day of their 2007-2008 term, the justices of the Supreme Court declined to hear two church-state cases that could have yielded controversial rulings.
Among the hundreds of cases the court turned away Oct. 1 were two involving confusion over the constitutional line dividing church and state.
The first involved a dispute over the rights of religious hospitals and other religiously affiliated employers that provide services that are not primarily religious. The justices turned away an appeal of a unanimous decision by New York's highest court upholding a state law that requires employers to include contraception in any prescription-drug coverage.
State legislators passed the law in 2002 after discovering that women often pay more than men for health care because many prescription insurance plans do not cover contraceptive drugs or devices. The law included an exception for religious employers. But it was very narrow, defining as exempt employers those whose primary purpose is to teach religious values, who primarily employ co-religionists, and who primarily serve people of their own faith.
A group of Catholic and Baptist institutions in New York that did not fit the criteria for the law's exemption sued. They said the law forced them to choose between two sets of religious values: whether to uphold their belief in providing fair job benefits by paying for prescription-drug insurance or to uphold their belief that certain forms of contraception are wrong.
But the New York Courts disagreed, saying the law didn't force quasi-religious employers to support contraception any more than it required all of the state's other employers to provide “approval of every medication or treatment used by the employees.”
The case was Catholic Charities v. Dinallo (No. 06-1550).
The second case the justices declined to hear involved the right of religious groups to use public facilities for worship on the same basis as other community organizations. The justices turned away an appeal from an evangelical congregation in Antioch, Calif. Faith Center Church Evangelistic Ministries had sought to use an Antioch public library as a meeting place for worship. Other community groups had used the facility for meetings.
But the Contra Costa County library system would not let the church use its facilities, arguing that doing so would essentially require the county's taxpayers to subsidize religious worship.
A divided panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. “Although religious worship is an important institution in any community, we disagree that anything remotely community-related must therefore be granted access to the Antioch Library meeting room,” the panel's two-member majority wrote.
The case was Faith Center Church v. Glover (No. 06-1633).
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