Why was Notre Dame treated so differently from all the other religious non-profits during this round of litigation? The fact that Notre Dame is a university doesn’t seem to be that important—at least four other colleges and universities were granted injunctions that delayed possible penalties.

Ira Lupu, a professor at the George Washington School of Law, said he thinks Notre Dame just had a bit of bad luck. “That might be a little bit of a fluke, that they drew what turned out to be misfortune in judges, and that judges in other places have been more sympathetic, and this set of judges wasn’t as sympathetic." He added, "Sympathetic isn’t the right word—they weren’t as persuaded."

But the way rulings have trended so far doesn’t necessarily predict the future. “The surprise in this run of cases is not Notre Dame—it’s all these other ones. As this unfolds, they may not do so well,” he said.

As these and other similar cases work their way through the courts, the important questions to keep in mind are these: What is it that Notre Dame and other religious organizations find morally objectionable about the law? And how much should the government accommodate religious organizations when they claim that a law violates their conscience?

These questions have more or less been answered when it comes to explicitly religious non-profits like churches. After several rounds of negotiations with HHS, these groups were exempted from the requirement to provide coverage. For-profit companies that claim a religious affiliation get no exemption, a rule that will be debated before the Supreme Court this spring.

Notre Dame falls into a third group: religiously affiliated non-profit groups, which might include hospitals, food banks, or universities. Like explicitly religious groups, these some of these organizations object to the portion of the Affordable Care Act that requires employers who offer insurance plans to include coverage of “the full range of Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods [and] sterilization procedures.” These groups can, in fact, avoid paying for, administering, advertising, or otherwise dealing with this birth control coverage in any way. They can file a notice stating their objections and transferring total responsibility for coverage to a third party. In other words, groups like Notre Dame or the Little Sisters of the Poor just need to sign a two-page document saying that they don’t want to provide coverage for contraceptives, and someone else will do it for them.

But a number of groups think this is still morally compromising, for this reason: If they sign a form saying they don’t want to provide birth control coverage, they’re implicitly saying that it’s okay if someone else does.

In the Little Sisters of the Poor case, the Obama administration argued that religious groups are framing their moral concerns incorrectly. Third-party administrators won’t become responsible for coordinating birth control coverage because a religious non-profit signs a piece of paper saying it objects. That coverage would happen in spite of an organization’s objections. (This semantic clarification isn’t applicable to the Little Sisters: Their third-party administrator also has objections to covering birth control, so none of the Little Sisters’ employees would get coverage, regardless.)