March for Life defeats Obamacare abortion mandate

From the Washington Post - hit the link for the whole article.

This is a vital win, and the principle should be applied to other groups.

“It’s a case that is a little bit unique among the other cases,” Matt Bowman, senior legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who represented March for Life, said at the time. “March for Life is not a religious organization. Their pro-life beliefs are based on science and ethics, but not faith.”

Now, a U.S. District Court has ruled that, like some like-minded religious groups, March for Life does not have to offer coverage for a service it doesn’t believe in.

“March for Life has been excised from the fold because it is not ‘religious,'” Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in his opinion. “This is nothing short of regulatory favoritism.”

He said the government had violated March for Life’s rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, which sets procedural standards for federal regulatory agencies.

“HHS provides no principled basis, other than the semantics of religious tolerance, for its distinction” between religious and secular objections, he wrote. “If the purpose of the religious employer exemption is, as HHS states, to respect the anti-abortifacient tenets of an employment relationship, then it makes no rational sense — indeed, no sense whatsoever — to deny March [for] Life that same respect.” (An abortifacient is a drug that causes abortion.)

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With strong language and no shortage of exclamation points, Leon laid out the case that March for Life was due the same “equal protection” offered religious groups exempt from provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

The government contends that “March for Life is not ‘similarly situated’ to the exempted [religious] organizations because it ‘is not religious and is not a church,'” he wrote. “… This not only oversimplifies the issue — it misses the point entirely!”

Just because March for Life wasn’t making a faith-based argument, Leon said, didn’t mean it didn’t need protection. The Department of Health and Human Services had sought to accommodate groups with religious objections. Why shouldn’t it accommodate secular groups with the same convictions?

“The characteristic that warrants protection — an employment relationship based in part on a shared objection to abortifacients — is altogether separate from theism,” he wrote. “Stated differently, what HHS claims to be protecting is religious beliefs, when it actually is protecting a moral philosophy about the sanctity of life.”

 

Comments

[Judith Anderson]

Take time to read the comments following the linked-to article. This ruling challenges some aspects of the up-side-down, Alice Through the Looking Glass world we live in. Equal protection. Yes. Imagine, defending the pre-born human child and not seeking to be party to his or her abortion/abortifacient death is considered "sub-standard" coverage, while insurance coverage that promotes the sub-standard and gruesome dismemberment and sale of body parts and other fetal atrocities conforms to high HHS standards? Sad.

[Judith Anderson]

Let's take a poll. How many post-abortive women would say the care they received when they went for an abortion was of high quality? Let's face it. Abortion hurts women in so many ways. Enshrining it under the law or forcing insurance coverage of it cannot change the nature of the act.