LifeNet

Little Sisters of the Poor v. Obamacare - a probable satisfactory settlement

This is from Ed Mechmann, the NY Archdiocese Director of Public Policy.

His posting is eight paragraphs long - we are excerpting two - plus the concluding paragraph. We strongly recommend you hit the link and read the entire posting.

A Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Now the religious organizations and the government have filed their briefs. The Little Sisters et al. readily agreed to the Court's suggestion, saying that they could comply with an arrangement where they are not required to take any action that would trigger the provision of the services, and if the services are actually provided by a separate insurance plan (even if it is run by their regular insurance carrier). This is all that the religious organizations have ever wanted -- to be left alone to do their work, without getting dragged into anyone's sex lives. In effect, they were saying to the Court, "This is the solution that we would have suggested to the government years ago, if they had only asked".

The government, for its part, reacted by quibbling, complaining, and digging their heels in. They complained about having to file a new brief. They insisted that no further concessions were necessary to protect the religious groups' consciences -- as if they knew better what is in violation of Catholic or Protestant moral teachings. They groused that the Court's suggestion would require changes to other sections of the law and regulations, as if that were something unheard-of, rather than the commonplace result of any litigation of this type. They continued to fantasize that any further accommodation would lead to a parade of horribles -- endless further litigation, thousands of women without health care, etc. And in the end, as if they were swallowing nasty-tasting medicine, they kind-of, sort-of, very reluctantly maybe agreed that the Court's suggestion would be barely acceptable. 

This ungracious reply hurts the government's credibility, and is cause to be hopeful for a positive result. The Court now has reason to wonder why the case is even before them, and has a clear way to resolve it.

>>>>>>>>

That would end this long nightmare, and vindicate the right to conscience of religious organizations. But it also raises a troubling question -- if such a common-sense solution was available all this time, why did the government insist on forcing the cooperation of the religious groups? I know of no other answer, other than the dministration's well-established hostility to traditional religious values, and their complete dedication to the spread of the ideology of sexual liberation, against any opposition.

 For more details - also forwarded around from Ed Mechmann - here are links to the Scotusblog website.

  The religious non-profits (e.g., the Little Sisters) accepted the Supreme Court's suggested resolution of the HHS mandate litigation: http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/04/religious-non-profits-fully-endorse-courts-birth-control-access-idea/.  The Government, predictably, was less than enthused: http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/04/u-s-would-accept-modest-change-on-birth-control-mandate-warily/.

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.”

 

Supreme Court Religious Freedom decision analysis

There are other good ones which we will be posting; here's one from yesterday's WSJ columnist, James Taranto. And Mr. Taranto is neither a Christian, nor is he pro-life. but he is honest.

Excerpts below the link.

The Corporate Conscience. Hobby Lobby and the left's contradictions.

For-profit corporations, at least if they are "closely held," can raise conscientious objections to government policies under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. So the Supreme Court held today, by a vote of 5-2, in the much-anticipated case now styled Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

The vote in Hobby Lobby's favor was actually 5-4, along familiar lines, but as we shall explain, two dissenting justices declined to address the question whether RFRA's protections can apply to for-profit companies. The majority, in a decision by Justice Samuel Alito held that Hobby Lobby and two other companies need not comply with the ObamaCare birth-control mandate, to which their owners object on religious grounds.

The plaintiffs in these cases did not claim their First Amendment rights had been violated; such a claim, as we noted in March, would almost certainly have been precluded by the 1990 case of Employment Division v. Smith. But Congress responded to that case by enacting RFRA, which mandates the courts apply "strict scrutiny" to government policies as enforced against litigants who object on religious grounds.

In order to meet strict scrutiny, the government must show both that the policy is justified by a "compelling" interest and that it is the "least restrictive means" of furthering that interest. At least five justices seemed to agree that the interest in assuring cost-free access to the abortifacient contraceptives in question is "compelling": the four dissenters and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who in a concurring opinion wrote: "It is important to confirm that a premise of the Court's opinion is its assumption that the HHS regulation at issue here furthers a legitimate and compelling interest in the health of female employees."

That's true, but the premise was stipulated--"we assume," wrote Justice Alito--not decided. For the plaintiffs to prevail, it would be sufficient for the government to fail either test, and as Justice Alito argues, it clearly failed the least-restrictive-means test:

In fact, HHS has already devised and implemented a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations while ensuring that the employees of these entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage. The employees of these religious nonprofit corporations still have access to insurance coverage without cost sharing for all FDA-approved contraceptives; and according to HHS, this system imposes no net economic burden on the insurance companies that are required to provide or secure the coverage.

Although HHS has made this system available to religious nonprofits that have religious objections to the contraceptive mandate, HHS has provided no reason why the same system cannot be made available when the owners of for-profit corporations have similar religious objections. We therefore conclude that this system constitutes an alternative that achieves all of the Government's aims while providing greater respect for religious liberty.

Some religious nonprofits have argued that the HHS accommodation is too restrictive and violates their First Amendment rights; this case does not address that question--or, indeed, whether "an approach of this type complies with RFRA," in Alito's words. The majority cite another less-restrictive alternative: a government program providing contraceptives directly.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed a hyperbolic dissent (citation omitted):

In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs. Compelling governmental interests in uniform compliance with the law, and disadvantages that religion-based opt-outs impose on others, hold no sway, the Court decides, at least when there is a "less restrictive alternative."

As Kennedy gently observes in response, "the Court's opinion does not have the breadth and sweep ascribed to it by the respectful and powerful dissent." Ginsburg suggests the decision would open up the possibility of religious exemptions from statutes prohibiting race discrimination, a claim Alito and the majority flatly reject: "The Government has a compelling interest in providing an equal opportunity to participate in the workforce without regard to race, and prohibitions on racial discrimination are precisely tailored to achieve that critical goal."

Ginsburg's claim that "the court decides" religious opt-outs should be available when a "less restrictive alternative" is available is misleading. Here the court did not, as it frequently does by necessity, apply a standard of its own invention in interpreting broadly written constitutional language. The "less restrictive alternative" language is in the RFRA statute; it was Congress, not the court, that made that decision.

 

Religious leaders unite against Obama insurance mandate

From Lifesite News -

Sixty pro-life leaders and heads of faith-based organizations have signed off on a letter to President Barack Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius protesting the very narrow exemption to the health insurance contraceptives mandate.

The mandate has upset pro-life groups that don’t want to be forced to provide health insurance coverage that pays for contraception, birth control drugs, or drugs like the morning after pill, Plan B and ella that can cause abortions in some circumstances. They have objected to a very narrow set of exemptions for religious groups that don’t adequately allow all faith-based organizations to opt out of providing such coverage.

Signatories of the letter include Protestant and orthodox Jewish leaders representing many religious colleges and universities, k-12 schools, grassroots faith-based organizations, denominations, law associations, rescue missions, and more.