When public health and the First Amendment clash on college campuses

A controversy that has plagued the campuses of Catholic colleges and universities for decades has reached a new level recently as the Obama administration is putting pressure on these institutions to cover the costs of birth control in their student health plans in accord with federal regulations. For years, Catholic institutions of higher education have stood against state and federal laws regarding the provision of contraceptives and related services to students due to deeply-held religious beliefs which consider it "morally wrong to prevent conception by any artificial means, including condoms, IUDs, birth control pills and sterilization." Administrators at the likes of Fordham and Georgetown claim that their universities have the right to First Amendment religious freedom protections and that they should not have to violate spiritually-motivated moral guidelines because of government-mandated health care regulations. The Obama administration, on the other hand, is relying "on the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine, an independent group of doctors and researchers that [has] concluded that birth control is not just a convenience but is medically necessary "'to ensure women’s health and well-being.'" The result is a high-profile clash between public health concerns and the First Amendment with no clear outcome.

A recent Supreme Court decision, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, (written about here in The New York Times) granted an exception to religious institutions with respect to fair hiring and employment discrimination laws, arguing that "churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference." If the First Amendment extends into the realm of who can be hired and who can be fired by a religious organization, one has to ask why it can't also, therefore, give Catholic colleges and universities (private institutions) the right to decide what kinds of medical care to provide their students.

For the record, I see a difference between the waiver of select anti-discrimination regulations to allow churches to choose who their ministers are and allowing religious dogma to trump documented and proven public health concerns, but neither the Supreme Court (nor, in an objective reading, the Constitution, for that matter) may agree. This is a classic case of how far we are willing to extend the broad protections of the First Amendment - protections, with respect to speech, which have already been granted (for better or for worse) to epithet-spewing protesters at the funerals of veterans and to corporations wishing to play a role in the political process. The question, in this case, is: how many rules that we expect the rest of society to follow do we want to bend - or break - in the name of religious freedom? I don't know the answer, and it's hard to tell how this issue will be resolved. For now, however, the battle continues to rage - on college campuses and elsewhere.