This Week in God.... (Maddow blog)

First up from the God Machine this week is an important legal fight over contraception and the Affordable Care Act – with the larger trend working in the White House’s favor.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling on “Obamacare,” the most significant challenges to the law’s legality have been exhausted, but there are some smaller cases that are pending, including litigation involving access to contraception .MSNBC’s Emma Margolin reported this week:

A federal appeals court has ruled against the Colorado-based Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged, finding that employees of such religious nonprofits must be able to access contraceptive coverage in line with the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Unlike last year’s controversial Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., which successfully challenged the health care law’s birth control mandate in its entirety, this case targeted a federal accommodation for nonprofit organizations with religious objections to birth control. All those groups have to do, under the accommodation, is submit a formal objection to including contraceptive coverage in their employee health plans, so that their health insurance issuers or a third-party administrator can provide the coverage directly.

As longtime readers may recall, Colorado’s Little Sisters of the Poor wants to provide health care coverage to its non-profit group’s employees, but it doesn’t want to cover contraception. No problem, the Obama administration said – the group can fill out some simple paperwork noting a religious objection, at which point a private insurance company can create a separate policy for workers who want access to birth control. The non-profit group wouldn’t be involved and wouldn’t pay a penny.

The nuns filed a federal lawsuit anyway, claiming that the paperwork itself infringes on their religious beliefs.

(the link: )

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/week-god-71815?cid=sm_fb_maddow