Talk Elections

I thought about this while on a panel tonight: Couldn't Bob Jones University v. United States be used as a precedent to say that Catholic institutions receiving federal money have to play by federal rules, meaning that if the federal government wants to mandate contraception being covered by insuracne companies, religious institutions receiving federal money would have to go along with it?

If I'm wrong, I'd really like to know, so I'm curious what our legal experts feel on this issue.

Unless I'm mistaken, not all Catholic institutions receive Federal monies, whereas the contraception mandate affects all them regardless of whether they do or not.  Hence the BJU case doesn't serve as a model for this particular issue without some new law being passed by Congress.  Incidentally, being beholden to Federal funds is precisely why a number of religious institutions were not happy about W's faith-based initiatives.  They were concerned that if they became dependent upon them to do their work, a future administration would do something similar to what you proposed.

Right - I'm just talking about those which do receive Catholic money (which many of them receive some).  But for those that do, is my interpretation of BJU v. US sound?

While I didn't explicitly say so, I thought it was fairly clear in my previous reply that I thought the approach you mentioned would work.  About the only way it would fail to work would be if to obtain the desired funds the religious institutions were required to do things that areligious institutions were not required to do.