The New York State Court of Appeals is New York state's top court.

In 2024, the New York court ruled that a state abortion benefits mandate applied to the Albany diocese and the other petitioners because they served or employed too many people from outside their sponsoring faiths to qualify for a religious organization exemption.

The U.S. Supreme Court says the New York ruling is clearly wrong, in light of a ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court issued June 5, in connection with an earlier case: Catholic Charities Bureau et al. v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission.

The Wisconsin case: Wisconsin offers an exemption for religious employers from its unemployment compensation tax.

The state's Catholic Charities Bureau asked for a religious employer exemption.

Wisconsin refused to give the Catholic Charities Bureau an exemption, saying that it did not qualify for a religious employer exemption because it employed people and served people from all religions, without trying to make them Catholic. The Catholic Charities Bureau argued that reaching out to people of all faiths is part of its religious beliefs.

All nine U.S. Supreme Court justices sided with the Catholic Charities Bureau. The justices held that a state cannot limit access to a religious exemption to organizations that serve or employ only members of one religion, or that try to convert people to their religion.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution "mandates government neutrality between religions and subjects any state-sponsored denominational preference to strict scrutiny," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in an opinion for the court on the Catholic Charities Bureau case.

Offering a religious exemption only to nonprofits that shut outsiders out or try to convert outsiders differentiates between religions based on theological lines and cannot stand, Sotomayor wrote.

The new ruling, on the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany et al. v. Harris case, shows that the Supreme Court is applying the same reasoning it used in the Catholic Charities Bureau case to employee benefits cases as to unemployment compensation taxes.

The benefits community is still waiting for Supreme Court action on another benefits case, Kennedy v. Braidwood Management.

Related: Supreme Court's bold move to save part of ACA preventive services package

The Kennedy v. Braidwood will have a direct effect on whether the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has the authority to make recommendations about what services should be part of the Affordable Care Act preventive services package.

That's the package of services that non-grandfathered major medical plans, including employers' self-insured plans, must cover without imposing deductibles or other cost-sharing requirements on the patients.

The Braidwood ruling could also end up having a big effect on all advisory panels throughout the federal government, because some legal experts say federal advisory panels may be constitutional only if all members are confirmed by the Senate or if all members can be fired by the president or by an official who's confirmed by the Senate.