No, Your Religious Delusions Do Not Trump the Law, Science, Medicine, Other People's Rights or a Pair of Clubs

And everyone who doesn't understand that doesn't deserve any rights at all. When are we going to start restricting the massive illegality and criminal abuse committed by freakazoids?

Ian Millhiser at Think Progress:

Missouri state Rep. Paul Joseph Wieland (R) does not want his daughters’ health plan to cover birth control — even though two of those daughters are adults. So he and his wife sued the Obama administration. Though this lawsuit was rejected on jurisdictional grounds by a federal trial court, a panel of three appellate judges reinstated the suit on Monday. Should the Wielands ultimately prevail in their effort to deny birth control coverage to their daughters, the decision could have implications far beyond the Wieland family, potentially forcing insurance companies to maintain elaborate records to track many of their customers’ views on religion and sexual morality.

Wieland v. Department of Health and Human Services seeks to expand the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which allowed many private businesses to ignore federal rules requiring them to include birth control in their employee’s health plans if the business’ owners object to contraception on religious grounds. The Wielands claim that a similar rule should apply in their case. Because they claim that they “cannot provide, fund or in any way be a participant in the provision of health care coverage” that includes birth control “without violating their sincerely-held religious beliefs,” they argue that they should be given a special health plan that does not include contraceptive care.

Are these adult daughters chained in their parents' basement that they cannot get jobs and apartments and buy their own contraception?  Because that's a crime and Wieland should be in prison.

But the daughters are just an excuse to make it impossible for anyone in the U.S. to get any kind of health care the Wielands and their freakazoid friends don't like.

The Wielands’ legal theory, moreover, could stretch far beyond families led by parents who object to contraception.

[I]magine a plaintiff who doesn’t just object to their daughters having birth control — they object to anyone having birth control. The nature of health insurance is that all of an insurance plan’s participants pay into a pool of money than any other participants can draw money out of when they need medical care. So even if a particular plaintiff’s own insurance doesn’t cover contraception, they would still be paying into a pool of money that other people could draw upon to pay for coverage that the plaintiff might object to. Moreover, while the insurance company might try to solve this problem by “walling off” the plaintiff’s premiums so that they could not be spent on contraceptive care, this would impose additional administrative costs on the insurer, and money is fungible. The only truly reliable way to ensure that a given insurance customer’s premiums are not used in a way that helps some woman, somewhere in the country to obtain birth control is to forbid the insurance plan from offering contraceptive coverage to anyone.

That might be an acceptable outcome for Paul and Teresa Wieland, but it would be a truly extraordinary expansion of American religious liberty law. A law intended to give religious objectors personal exemptions to laws they oppose would instead permit those objectors to impose their beliefs on thousands — potentially even millions — of individuals who do not share those beliefs.