The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
The justices, without comment, turned aside an appeal by Catholic Charities of Sacramento from a decision in March by the California Supreme Court. The state justices ruled that the 4-year-old law was a valid anti- discrimination measure that didn't interfere with religious beliefs or practices. The church-affiliated charity remains "free to express its disapproval of prescription contraceptives and to encourage its employees not to use them'' as long as it treats male and female employees equally, the California court said at the time.
The court action is "a huge victory for working women who have suffered unfair and unjust discrimination,'' said California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, whose office defended the law. "As the California courts have consistently ruled, nonreligious employers cannot discriminate against women in the workplace based on their employers' religious beliefs.''
Catholic Charities admitted that they didn't qualify as "religious" under the test created by the law (a test for an exception which they themselves insisted must exist); instead, they challenged the nature of the test itself. Many may think it problematic to have a test which forces the government to be in the position of judging whether an organization is "really" religious or not — but so long as there are laws that treat religious organizations differently from secular ones, some sort of test is unavoidable. One of the justices in California failed to recognize this:
The sole dissenter from the March ruling, Justice Janice Rogers Brown, said the state was "interfering with religious practice ... by making a judgment about what is or is not religious."
If we were to apply that critique consistently, the state wouldn't be able to have any test to separate religious from non-religious groups for the purpose of taxation, to cite just one important example. Of course the government is involved with making judgments "about what is or is not religious" — and religious believers want it that way. They are, after all, the primary force behind religious individuals and organizations being exempt from this or that law or regulation.
As it stands, the test being used for the California law appears to be quite reasonable and just, given the purpose of the law. I've yet to see anyone offer any superior replacement that would achieve the same goals but do a better job at separating "real" religious groups from the secular ones. Instead, all I see are general and vague complaints that apply to having tests generally, complaints which (as should be obvious by now) are wrongheaded unless one seeks to eliminate religious exemptions entirely.
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