By Paul Gowder

While the U.S. Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling last week generated all the headlines, a little-noticed injunction the court granted on Thursday, in the case of Wheaton College v. Burwell, could spell the real end of the contraceptive coverage mandate.

Under the Hobby Lobby ruling, Wheaton, as a religiously affiliated college, is not obliged to pay for contraceptive coverage for its employees. But in Thursday's injunction, the court went further. Wheaton objected to merely filing the form that notifies the federal government, as well as its insurance provider, that it has a religious objection to providing contraceptive coverage. The court upheld the objection, and enjoined the government from making Wheaton file the form.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained Wheaton's stated reasons: "Its filing of a self-certification form will make it complicit in the provision of contraceptives by triggering the obligation for someone else to provide the services to which it objects."

The logic is clear: If Wheaton files the form, it indirectly causes contraceptive coverage and thus the possibility of contraception to be delivered to its employees, and thus becomes a participant in contraception.

That the Supreme Court found Wheaton's logic sufficient to grant an emergency injunction under the All Writs Act should be troubling to any informed observer. As Justice Sotomayor explained, such an injunction is granted only when the court believes the party seeking the injunction has a right that is "extraordinarily clear." The court has thus sent an unmistakable signal: It is likely to rule that the federal government is prohibited from forcing an employer to merely be a small link in a causal chain that leads to contraception.

It should be noted that the court so ruled over the dissent of all three of the court's women and none of the men. The mere fact of the dissent suggests that Wheaton's claim is not "extraordinarily clear." The gender breakdown reveals the court's remarkable deafness to the half of the population with a personal stake in contraception.

The court claims this ruling will not keep contraception from being delivered to Wheaton employees because Wheaton has notified the federal government of its objections without using the form, and the government can act on that notification to ensure that Wheaton's employees get contraceptive coverage by other means.

But Wheaton's logic is not so easily cabined. If the government compels insurers to cover contraception for Wheaton employees after such an informal notice, then Wheaton has indirectly caused its employees to be covered. The formality or informality of the notice makes no difference.

Moreover, if the contraceptive coverage mandate is to actually cover the employees of religious organizations, however the implementing regulations are ultimately structured, any time a religious employer refuses to pay for contraceptive coverage, that refusal must trigger a legal obligation on the part of someone else (an insurer or the government) to provide the coverage.

The inexorable conclusion of Wheaton's logic is that once it refuses to provide contraceptive coverage, nobody may be required by law to step into the breach. For that reason, Wheaton's claim is fundamentally incompatible with the structure of the contraceptive coverage mandate, with or without a work­around for conscientious objectors.

By granting an injunction on the premise that the merits of Wheaton's argument are "extraordinarily clear," the court has signaled that the contraceptive requirement's days are numbered. It has also quietly adopted a reading of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act so broad that the worst fears of Hobby Lobby protesters — about the pending destruction of many of the workplace protections for women as well as gays and lesbians — appear to be well-founded.

THE AUTHOR:PAUL GOWDER is an associate professor of law at the University of Iowa. Contact: Paul-gowder@uiowa.edu.