But the act does not require the employer to provide the pills or even to pay for them. Employers pay for an insurance program. That insurance, not the pills themselves, is part of the package the employees receive by law as payment for their work, just like their hourly wages. No employee, male or female, is required to use any method of contraception. That is the employee’s private medical decision. The employer is not involved.

To the plaintiffs, that doesn’t matter. Their brief, filed last week, argues that they "object to being forced to facilitate abortion by providing abortifacients, and that objection does not turn on the independent decisions of their employees."

The Court has repeatedly declared this "facilitate" argument categorically false. Most recently, it did so by proclaiming that an objector to how someone else uses his or her wages has suffered no injury and thus can’t even bring a lawsuit. It has so held in cases that concern the most sacred single religious guarantee in American history—the promise, in the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, that no taxpayer will be forced to pay tax money into the coffers of a religious organization.

That guarantee flows directly out of James Madison’s 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance, the mother document of American religious freedom. Madison was writing to protest a proposal in the Virginia legislature for a state tax to support churches in every county. The small size of the tax would not prevent it from being a primal violation of the sacred right of conscience, Madison wrote: "Who does not see ... that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?"

No Court in American history has questioned that the Establishment Clause bars tax support for religious bodies. Because it is so central to our system, in fact, the Warren Court carved out a special cause of action for taxpayers who can show that tax money is being directly sent to religious organizations. Taxpayers ordinarily have no "standing to sue" to prevent tax money from being spent in ways that they think are unconstitutional—for example, to finance undeclared wars, or welfare programs they allege violate "states’ rights." If they can show that their money is being given directly to churches, however, they do have standing. Standing depends on an actual, direct injury to the plaintiff; the direct use of tax money by churches injures—violates the rights of conscience of—any taxpayer who objects.

But that’s the rub. For the past 30 years, the Court has been quite friendly to cooperation between government and religion; and over the years, it has established a principle that should apply in the contraceptive-mandate cases. That principle is this: When government directly funds religion, the Establishment Clause is violated; but when government gives benefits to individuals, and the individuals pass on the benefit to religion, no dissenter is injured, so there’s no violation.