A Little Sister at the big court

Earlier this week I sat on a long wooden bench in the regal marble chambers of the Supreme Court to hear arguments associated with the case my order, the Little Sisters of the Poor, reluctantly filed over two years ago. Today, Good Friday, I am told the Justices will meet to decide the fate of the women in my religious community as well as the fate of the elderly poor people that live with us.  I dare say they also decide the fate of all Americans. 

For two years my order has been in and out of Court asking our Justice system to protect our religious liberty.  To my great sadness our position on this case has sometimes been misunderstood or mischaracterized.  Namely, we believe we commit a grave sin if we provide certain services, such as the week-after pill, in our health insurance plan.

{mosads}Yesterday in Court one of the Justices stated: “Sometimes when a religious person who’s not a hermit or a monk is a member of society, he does have to accept all kinds of things that are just terrible for him.”

The Justice is right: when one lives in a pluralistic society people have different beliefs.  In a democracy like ours, people must accept that others may disagree and engage in acts and behavior others may consider unacceptable and even terrible.  We do accept this principle. Therefore, we did not go to Court to prevent the government from providing these services to women who want them.  We went to Court to ask them not to force us, an order of nuns, to provide them.

The court proceedings held one major disappointment for me. I had been hoping that the government would finally explain why it cannot use its own healthcare exchanges to provide policies with these services to anyone who wants them. We have repeatedly pointed out that the government has said its exchanges are a perfectly good alternative for tens of millions of other people, and that the government had not shown why they could not work for any employee of ours who wishes to use them.

But the government gave no explanation. Their lawyer would only talk about why he thought a separate contraceptive-only plan would not work (though the government allows for separate dental plans, and many of us also have separate prescription coverage, vision coverage, and the like).  But he never addressed the complete plans that are on the exchanges and already available.

One point did become very clear; that the government cannot achieve their goals without taking over our plan. For the last two years, it had been denying that it wanted to use our plans, at one point mocking our concerns as a fight against an “invisible dragon.”  They used to claim that these services were completely separate and independent of our health plan. But yesterday they seemed to abandon that argument, instead telling the Justices that the coverage needed to be a “seamless” part of the healthcare we provide our employees. Of course that is precisely what we cannot do. The Chief Justice and Justice Kennedy both suggested that the government was, in fact, trying to hijack our plan.

It is the height injustice that the government has exempted about 100 million people from this mandate, including big companies like Exxon and Pepsi, and the government’s own plans for military families and the disabled. But while it is willing to be flexible in its own plans and to let businesses save money, the agency refuses to give us the same right. Our lawyer said that the Court wanted us, conscientious objectors to become conscientious collaborators.

Today we fast and pray for all of our elderly for whom we care in our homes. We also fast and pray that the Court will decide to preserve not only our religious liberty but that of all Americans. 

Maguire is Mother Provincial of the Little Sisters of the Poor.