Conscientious Objection, Complicity, and Accommodation

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.1 inaugurated an unprecedented deference to religious challenges to secular laws,2 which Zubik v. Burwell neither retrenched nor replace.3 On the Court's highly deferential stance, complicity claims seem to know no bounds: just so long as the objector thinks himself complicit in an act his religion opposes, the Court will conclude that the challenged legal requirement substantially burdens his religious exercise.4 The result is a set of exemptions of Court-imposed negotiations based on assertions of complicity that many courts and commentators find far-fetched, and perhaps even fantastical.5