Another Contraception Dispute Looms For The Supreme Court

WASHINGTON (AP) — How much distance from an immoral act is enough?

That's the difficult question behind the next legal dispute over religion, birth control and the health law that is likely to be resolved by the Supreme Court.

The issue in more than four dozen lawsuits from faith-affiliated charities, colleges and hospitals that oppose some or all contraception as immoral is how far the Obama administration must go to accommodate them.

The justices on June 30 relieved businesses with religious objections of their obligation to pay for women's contraceptives among a range of preventive services the new law calls for in their health plans.

Religious-oriented nonprofit groups already could opt out of covering the contraceptives. But the organizations say the accommodation provided by the administration does not go far enough because, though they are not on the hook financially, they remain complicit in the provision of government-approved contraceptives to women covered by their plans.

"Anything that forces unwilling religious believers to be part of the system is not going to pass the test," said Mark Rienzi, senior counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents many of the faith-affiliated nonprofits. Hobby Lobby Inc., winner of its Supreme Court case last month, also is a Becket Fund client.

The high court will be asked to take on the issue in its term that begins in October. A challenge from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, probably will be the first case to reach the court.

The Obama administration argues that the accommodation creates a generous moral and financial buffer between religious objectors and funding birth control. The nonprofit groups just have to raise their hands and say that paying for any or all of the 20 devices and methods approved by government regulators would violate their religious beliefs.

To do so, they must fill out a government document known as Form 700 that enables their insurers or third-party administrators to take on the responsibility of paying for the birth control. The employer does not have to arrange the coverage or pay for it. Insurers get reimbursed by the government through credits against fees owed under other parts of the health law.

Houses of worship and other religious institutions whose primary purpose is to spread the faith are exempt from the requirement to offer birth control.

The objections by religious nonprofits are rooted in teachings against facilitating sin.

Roman Catholic bishops and other religious plaintiffs argue that filling out the government form that registers opposition to contraceptives, then sending the document to the insurer or third-party administrator, is akin to signing a permission slip to engage in evil.

In the Hobby Lobby case, the justices rejected the government argument that there was no violation of conscience because the link between birth control coverage and the outcome the employer considers morally wrong was slight.

Just hours after the Hobby Lobby decision, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta granted a temporary reprieve to the Alabama-based Eternal Word Television Network. Judge William H. Pryor Jr. said in a separate opinion in that case that the administration "turns a blind eye to the undisputed evidence that delivering Form 700 would violate the Network's religious beliefs."

But the Supreme Court could draw a distinction between subsidizing birth control and signing a document to deputize a third-party to do so, said Robin Fretwell Wilson, a family law specialist at the University of Illinois College of Law.

"Think about how thinned down that objection is," Fretwell Wilson said. "The court might say that is a bridge too far."

Judge Karen Nelson Moore of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati said the document is a reasonable way for objecting organizations to inform the insurer, but that the obligation to cover contraception is in the health law, not the form.

"Self-certification allows the eligible organization to tell the insurance issuer and third-party administrator, 'We're excused from the new federal obligation relating to contraception,' and in turn, the government tells those insurance companies, 'But you're not,'" the judge wrote.

People on both sides of this argument are looking to the Hobby Lobby case for clues about how the justices might come out in this next round.

In a Supreme Court filing, the Justice Department said the outcome strongly suggested that the court would rule in its favor when considering the nonprofits' challenge.

"The decision in Hobby Lobby rested on the premise that these accommodations 'achieve all of the Government's aims' underlying the preventive-health services coverage requirement 'while providing greater respect for religious liberty,'" the Justice Department wrote, quoting from Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion. The legal filing was in opposition to an emergency plea from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, to avoid having to fill out Form 700. Wheaton is one of only a few nonprofits not to have won temporary relief in its court fight.

Rienzi, who also represents Wheaton, wrote in reply that the government is wrong to assume that the Hobby Lobby decision "blessed the accommodation." He noted that Alito specifically said the court was not deciding whether the administration's workaround for nonprofits adequately addressed their concerns.

On Thursday, the court, with three justices dissenting, allowed Wheaton to avoid using the form while its case remains on appeal. Instead, the college can send written notice of its objections directly to the Health and Human Services Department rather than the insurer or the third-party administrator. At the same time, the government can take steps to ensure that women covered by Wheaton's health plan can get emergency contraception the college won't pay for.

Several legal experts said that perhaps a simple revision to the government document at the center of the dispute could resolve matters.

"I think the question will come down to does the government really need them to tell the insurance companies or can you reword the form," said Marc Stern, a religious liberty specialist and general counsel for the American Jewish Committee. The faith-affiliated charities "might win a redrafting of the form. I don't think they can win an argument that says we can do absolutely nothing," Stern said.

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Zoll reported from New York.

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15 Charts That Prove We're Far From Post-Racial

On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, officially banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and in general public facilities.

Fifty years removed from that milestone, it's apparently easy to think that we're over racism.

Here are 15 facts that prove that's not the case.

1) Affluent blacks and Hispanics still live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes.

An analysis of census data conducted by researchers at Brown University found that income isn't the main driving factor in the segregation of U.S. cities. "With only one exception (the most affluent Asians), minorities at every income level live in poorer neighborhoods than do whites with comparable incomes," the researchers found.

"We cannot escape the conclusion that more is at work here than simple market processes that place people according to their means," their report stated. Along with residential segregation, the study notes, comes access to fewer resources for those in minority neighborhoods.

2) There's a big disparity in wealth between white Americans and non-white Americans.

White Americans held more than 88 percent of the country's wealth in 2010, according to a Demos analysis of Federal Reserve data, though they made up 64 percent of the population. Black Americans held 2.7 percent of the country's wealth, though they made up 13 percent of the population.

Much has been written explaining that the racial wealth gap didn't come about by accident. Among other factors, FHA redlining, restrictive covenants, and exploitative contract selling practices that capitalized on black families' inability to get conventional mortgages all prevented African-Americans from generating wealth through home ownership for much of the 20th century.

3) The racial wealth gap kept widening well after the Civil Rights era.

It nearly tripled between 1984 and 2009, according to a Brandeis study.

4) The Great Recession didn't hit everyone equally.

Between 2007 and 2010, Hispanic families' wealth fell by 44 percent, and black families' by 31 percent, compared to 11 percent for white families.

5) In the years before the financial crisis, people of color were much more likely to be targeted for subprime loans than their white counterparts, even when they had similar credit scores.

The Center For Responsible Lending came to that conclusion after analyzing government-provided mortgage data for the year 2004, supplemented with information from a propriety subprime loan database.

"For many types of loans, borrowers of color in our database were more than 30 percent more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk," the authors of the report wrote.

This wasn't a new phenomenon. HUD data from 1998 also showed that predominantly black neighborhoods at every income level had a much greater share of subprime refinance mortgages than predominantly white neighborhoods.

6) Minority borrowers are still more likely to get turned down for conventional mortgage loans than white people with similar credit scores.

An Urban Insititute data analysis found that mortgage denial rates from government-sponsored servicers are higher for black applicants with bad credit than for white applicants with bad credit:

7) Black and Latino students are more likely to attend poorly funded schools.

"A 10 percentage-point increase in the share of nonwhite students in a school is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending," a 2012 analysis of Department Education data by the Center For American Progress found.

8) School segregation is still widespread.

80 percent of Latino students attend segregated schools and 43 percent attend intensely segregated schools -- ones with only up to 10 percent of white students. 74 percent of black students attend segregated schools, and 38 percent attend intensely segregated schools.

9) As early as preschool, black students are punished more frequently, and more harshly, for misbehaving than their white counterparts.

"Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 42 percent of the preschool children suspended once, and 48 percent of the preschool children suspended more than once," a Department of Education report, released in March, noted.

10) Perceptions of the innocence of children are still often racially skewed.

A study published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that participants estimated black boys to be older and less innocent than white boys of the same age.

When participants were told that the boys, both black and white, were suspected of crimes, the disparity in perceptions of age and innocence became more stark:

Separate research by Stanford psychologists suggests that these kinds of racialized perceptions of innocence contribute to non-white juvenile offenders receiving harsher sentences than their white peers.

11) White Americans use drugs more than black Americans, but black people are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites.

This contributes to the fact that 1 in 3 black males born today can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes, based on current incarceration trends.

12) Black men receive prison sentences 19.5 percent longer than those of white men who committed similar crimes, a 2013 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found.

13) A clean record doesn't protect young black men from discrimination when they're looking for work.

Young white men with felony convictions are more likely to get called back after a job interview than young black men with similar qualifications and clean records, a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Sociology found.

14) Black job seekers are often turned away by U.S. companies on the assumption that they do drugs.

The presence of drug testing may actually help to correct this and increase black job seekers' chances, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study released in May.

15) Employers are more likely to turn away job seekers if they have African-American-sounding names.

Applicants with white-sounding names get one callback per 10 resumes sent while those with African-American-sounding names get one callback per 15 resumes, according to a 2003 National Bureau of Economic Research report. "Based on our estimates," the researchers wrote, "a White name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience."

Juicy Couture Founders: 'It's Been Painful To Watch The Brand Fall'

Juicy Couture's rhinestone-encrusted clothes were once sold out of gleaming flagship stores on famed shopping streets like Manhattan's Fifth Avenue.

Now, they're peddled at Kohl's.

Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor, the founders of Juicy Couture and co-authors of the new tell-all about the brand The Glitter Plan, weren't counting on Juicy's downfall when they stepped away from the business forever four years ago.

"It's been painful to watch the brand fall down after we left," Skaist-Levy told The Huffington Post in an interview on Wednesday. "We wanted Juicy to be the great American girly brand. It was our legacy."

The pair sold Juicy to Liz Claiborne for $53.1 million in 2003, but remained in charge of the brand. They watched as it shot to the forefront of pop culture. Celebrities from Paris Hilton to Jennifer Aniston trotted around in bedazzled velour tracksuits. The clothes spilled out into suburbia, where it-teens and affluent moms sported "Juicy" butts.

But over the years, Juicy faded. It didn't move to adopt new fashion trends, opting to stick with the same old styles that succeeded during its heyday a decade earlier. Sales of the tracksuits withered away, and Juicy never came up with another hit product to bring back shoppers.

Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor left Juicy and Liz Clairborne in 2010 after disagreements with chief executive Bill McComb. (Liz Claiborne then changed its name to Fifth & Pacific, then changed it again to Kate Spade & Co.)

Pamela Skaist-Levy (L) and Gela Nash-Taylor (R).

"We were just hanging on" in 2003, said Nash-Taylor, reflecting on the sale. "But you have to also know that when you have a company like Juicy, when you sell it, there's always a chance that someone will not see the vision the same way we did, and you have to live with that."

In September 2013, Juicy changed hands again: Authentic Brands Group, a licensing company that controls the rights to the brands of dead celebrities Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, bought the company from then-Fifth & Pacific for $195 million.

Though Juicy's last U.S. stores will close this month, ABG plans to open new boutiques, tentatively named World of Juicy, in New York City next year. CEO Jamie Salter told HuffPost that he's trying to get the "coolness back."

“The beach, the whole relaxed lifestyle that Juicy Couture created -- as time went on, they sort of forgot about that,” said Salter.

The new Juicy will divide its products into two tiers. The regular wares will still be sold in places like Kohl's, while a new, premium "black label" line will be available online and in the forthcoming boutique shops.

Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor aren't done yet with sparkly California glam. They've started a brand called Pam & Gela, attempting to recreate the magic that helped make them millions a decade ago. The new label, which launched this spring and is available at swanky department stores like Bloomingdale's and Neiman Marcus, hones in on that L.A.-luxe vibe, the duo said.

"The Pam & Gela girl is hanging out at the corner of Melrose and La Brea, pretty much," wrote Style.com's Maya Singer. "She's got a couple of tattoos and a regular and expensive habit at M Cafe de Chaya."

As for Juicy, Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor wish the brand the best, but it's no longer part of their lives. They've turned off their Google Alerts for 'Juicy Couture' and watch from the sidelines, hoping ABG can do something to "resurrect" the name.

"Juicy is just not our baby any more," said Skaist-Levy. "It's like thinking about your high school boyfriend. He was cute then, and that was all good, but that was the past."