The Freedom From Religion Foundation has filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court against an assertion by Catholic-affiliated nonprofits in its home state that they are exempt from Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance program.
FFRF points out that if the Supreme Court overturns the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision that nonprofits must provide unemployment benefits, it would have egregious consequences for workers nationwide.
Catholic Charities and four other subsidiary nonprofit organizations affiliated with the Catholic Diocese of Superior Wisconsin are petitioning the Supreme Court to allow them to take advantage of Wisconsin’s narrow church exemption to its unemployment insurance program. Catholic Charities and the other nonprofit organizations, however, provide the same type of services provided by secular nonprofits, plus they do not require their employees to be Catholic or ask them to minister to clients. Nevertheless, they argue that they should be allowed to take advantage of the church exemption to state-mandated unemployment insurance simply because their parent entity created them as part of its religious mission.
Expanding a narrow church exemption to include all entities with religious motivations behind their work is unfounded, as FFRF demonstrates in its brief.
First, the First Amendment claims advanced by Catholic Charities have been considered and rejected in numerous prior cases by the U.S. Supreme Court, and rightfully so, FFRF contends. While Catholic Charities claims that Wisconsin should not be permitted to inquire into the activities performed by church-affiliated nonprofits in order to determine if they qualify for the state’s narrow exemption, FFRF points out that the First Amendment protects against government involvement in sacred matters, not from fact-based inquiries into an organization’s activities.
“The Supreme Court has upheld such generally applicable government regulations even when coupled with direct government oversight and auditing,” states the brief. “A similarly minimal review of the secular activities of a nonprofit claiming an exemption from the Wisconsin unemployment program does not threaten to excessively entangle religion and government.”
Second, FFRF stresses that Catholic Charities’ argument, if accepted by the Supreme Court, would allow all religiously affiliated organizations, including over half of the 10 largest health systems in the United States, to potentially claim exemptions from unemployment insurance and countless other government regulations. The Supreme Court’s decision will reach far beyond the five petitioner-employers in this case. The Catholic Charities argument would equally extend to over 787,000 health care employees nationwide. In Wisconsin, more than 40 percent of hospital beds are at religiously affiliated, mostly Catholic-run hospitals, while nationally, religiously affiliated hospitals account for about 20 percent of hospital beds.
And while the Diocese created Catholic Charities and its sub-entities to satisfy its religious mission, there is nothing religious about the operations of the petitioner-employers themselves, FFRF points out. The only sense in which these employers are “religious” is indirectly, through their parent entity’s affiliation with the Catholic Church. None of these features distinguish Catholic Charities from the numerous other religiously affiliated nonprofits operating nationwide.
In addition, Catholic Charities’ argument would logically extend to countless government regulations beyond Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance exemptions. Outside of Wisconsin, numerous state and federal laws require the government to assess whether a church-affiliated organization is being operated for religious purposes.
Additionally, under the Catholic Charities’ argument, all an organization would have to do to receive an exemption to the state’s unemployment program would be to draw a connection between its operation and the religious mission of its parent entity or simply state that its operation is motivated by sincerely held religious beliefs. Such an outcome would devastate the state’s unemployment program and leave thousands of Wisconsin employees without unemployment protection.
“It’s never reassuring, of course, when the Supreme Court accepts an appeal where the lower court has ruled correctly against religious privileging,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president. “You’d think that a group cloaking itself with a religious mantle would be ashamed to be fighting so hard to refuse to pay unemployment insurance and thereby deny their employees this basic protection.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is the largest national association of freethinkers, representing atheists, agnostics, and others who form their opinions about religion based on reason, rather than faith, tradition, or authority. Founded nationally in 1978 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, FFRF has more than 41,000 members, including members in every state and the District of Columbia. FFRF’s primary purposes are to educate about nontheism and to preserve the cherished constitutional principle of separation between religion and government. As a secular organization that promotes the separation of state and church as envisioned by the Constitution’s Framers, FFRF offers a unique viewpoint on the socioeconomic dangers that arise when the government grants preferential treatment to religious organizations.
