Free exercise

It's clear as day.

To interfere with your free exercise of your religion I have to stop or hinder you doing something.

Going to mass, for example, or receiving communion.

Or attending prayers at your mosque or synagogue.

Or teaching or studying your religion.

Or indoctrinating your children in your religious beliefs, however objectionable or obviously false, or contrary to the scientific view of things.

A free-exercise absolutist would insist forbidding animal or human sacrifice, polygamy, or ritual prostitution are also interferences that, like any other, are prohibited to the federal government, but not the states, by the First Amendment.

After all, how many ways are there to understand "Congress shall make no law"?

Forcing you to act contrary to your religious beliefs is a different thing, though apparently many think it is not.

And even more remote from such interference would be requiring you to do something that enables somebody else to do something prohibited not by his but by your religious beliefs, though it does not ensure that he will.

Such as, say, requiring Quakers to pay taxes that are partly used to fund the military and actual wars.

Or requiring employers to cover medical services forbidden by their own religions.

Think of blood transfusions and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Or, as in the present case, contraceptives.

But it's not really the First Amendment at issue, here, but a federal law purporting to clarify it by forbidding any law to substantially burden free exercise without compelling reason.

Leave aside that statutes can no more clarify than change the constitution.

Leave aside that this statute appears to lack foundation in any of the congress's constitutionally assigned powers.

Leave aside that this statute, intended by conservatives to strengthen protection of free exercise, instead weakens it.

All the same, the considerations above still apply.

Interfering with free exercise is stopping you doing something required or urged by your religion.

Making you do something forbidden or discountenanced by it is another.

And making you do something that enables somebody else to do such a thing is yet another step away from interference with free exercise.

Yet even those who support this requirement of Obamacare grant what is not true, as in this ungrammatical clause by Jill Filipovic in The Guardian, "Free religious exercise is burdened when the government forces an individual to participate in activities that violate their [sic] religious beliefs[.]"

And perhaps this is what lawyers generally think - mush heads that they are, despite their endless, ludicrous crowing about logical rigor and clear thinking - and plausibly reflects legislative intent.

But it's nonsense.

And the truth, by the way, is that lawyers by trade specialize in pettifogging obfuscation and obscurantism, not to say the most egregious lying.

An honorable profession, indeed.

And don't later federal laws just trump earlier ones in case of conflict, anyway?

Which came later, Obamacare or RFRA?