January 30, 2014
OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Pennsylvania, have filed a friend of the court brief urging the United States Supreme Court to reject the claim that a corporation can use religion as a justification to discriminate against women by refusing to make coverage for contraception available as required by federal law. The ACLU’s brief discusses the history of attempts to invoke religion to trump anti-discrimination measures to explain that such attempts are not new, and such attempts have been consistently rejected by the courts since the civil rights movement.
“Religion was invoked to justify slavery and segregation, as well as women’s subjugation. But as the law and society have advanced, religiously based arguments to justify noncompliance with anti-discrimination laws have been routinely rejected,” said Ryan Kiesel, Executive Director of the ACLU of Oklahoma.
The contraception rule addresses a challenging set of inequalities that remain a vestige of gender discrimination: the sex disparities in the cost of health care, the historical exclusion of coverage for health care unique to women, and the need for women to have meaningful access to all forms of contraception so that they can control unintended pregnancies and enjoy greater equality in society.
“We are asking the Supreme Court to reject the use religion to justify discrimination against their female employees,” said Brady Henderson, Legal Director for the ACLU of Oklahoma. “A ruling that gives businesses license to discriminate if they couch their discrimination in terms of religion would endanger decades of progress we’ve made as a state and nation.”
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