As the case moves up to the U.S. Supreme Court, a federal appeals court Friday in Denver temporarily suspended its demand that the nuns of the Denver-based Little Sisters of the Poor violate their faith by distributing contraceptives and abortion-causing drugs under Obamacare.
By a 2-1 vote July 14, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Obama administration can force the nuns to provide their employees with the drugs, which violate Roman Catholic teaching.
Mark Rienzi, senior counsel for the Becket Fund, which is representing the Little Sisters, said it’s remarkable that the U.S. government argues it must have the help of the nuns to distribute contraceptives.
“The federal government doesn’t need the Little Sisters or any other ministry to help it distribute abortion-inducing drugs and other contraceptives. Yet it not only insists on forcing them to participate in the delivery, it argues that their beliefs against participating are wrong and that government officials and judges can tell the Little Sisters what Catholic theology really requires,” he said.
“That’s wrong, and it’s dangerous – especially when those same government officials have disrespectfully compared the Sisters’ beliefs to ‘fighting an invisible dragon’ that can be vanquished with the ‘stroke of the [Sisters’] own pen.'”
WND reported when the order of nuns, who run homes for needy elderly people around the world, submitted a notice of appeal to the high court.
A filing by the Becket Fund charged that the Health and Human Services Department “insists on overriding concededly sincere religious objections even when HHS itself does not believe forced compliance will actually advance its regulatory goals.”
Becket earlier defeated the Obama administration in a similar case involving Hobby Lobby.
Rienzi said: “The government has lost every single time they have made these arguments before the Supreme Court – including last year’s landmark Hobby Lobby case. One would think they would get the message and stop pressuring the sisters.”
He said the government is “willing to exempt big companies like Exxon, Chevron and Pepsi Bottling, but it won’t leave the Little Sisters alone.”
Churches are exempted from providing contraceptives, but religion-based organizations such as the senior centers run by the sisters are not.
Obamacare demands that they provide the drugs or sign over the right to do it to another group. The nuns say they cannot abide by their faith and provide abortifacients, and signing over the responsibility to someone else is essentially the same thing.
Also involved in the case are Christian Brothers Employee Benefit Trust, Christian Brothers Services, Reaching Souls International, Truett-McConnell College and GuideStone Financial Resources.
“The sisters consider it immoral to help the government distribute these drugs. But instead of simply exempting them, the government insists that it can take over their ministry’s employee healthcare to distribute these drugs to their employees, while dismissing the sisters’ moral objections as irrelevant,” said Rienzi. “In America, judges and government bureaucrats have no authority to tell the Little Sisters what is moral or immoral. And the government can distribute its drugs without nuns – it has its own healthcare exchanges that can provide whatever it wants.”
Sister Loraine Marie Maguire, mother provincial of the Little Sisters of the Poor, said she hopes the Supreme Court “will hear our case and ensure that people from diverse faiths can freely follow God’s calling in their lives.”
“As Little Sisters of the Poor we dedicate our lives to serving the neediest in society, with love and dignity,” she said. “We perform this loving ministry because of our faith and simply cannot choose between our care for the elderly poor and our faith, and we shouldn’t have to.”
At the 10th Circuit, Judge Bobby Baldock objected to the majority ruling written by Scott Matheson, an Obama appointee, and joined by Monroe McKay.
Obamacare’s “accommodation scheme,” Baldock wrote, “forces the self-insured plaintiffs to perform an act that causes their beneficiaries to receive religiously objected-to coverage.”
“The fines the government uses to compel this act thus impose a substantial burden on the self-insured plaintiffs’ religion exercise. … Moreover, less restrictive means exist to achieve the government’s contraceptive coverage goals here,” he wrote.
The appeals court claimed participating in the government’s contraception delivery scheme is “as easy as obtaining a parade permit, filing a simple tax form, or registering to vote.” The court rejected the nuns’ belief that participating in the scheme “make[s] them complicit in the overall delivery scheme.”
But Baldock said the government “has left self-insured plaintiffs in a position where they must decide whether their beneficiaries will actually receive objected-to contraceptive coverage.”
“The accommodation does not absolve these plaintiffs of this responsibility. Instead, it forces them to either (1) violate their sincere religious beliefs by performing an action that will cause their beneficiaries to receive objected-to coverage, or (2) violate the law. … This is a Hobson’s choice and thus a substantial burden on their religious exercise.”
The government is looking at penalties of up to $2.5 million per year for the nuns.
WND reported the case, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell, is one of dozens filed against the Obama administration by religious schools, organizations and others over the government’s decision to force them to violate their faith or pay massive IRS penalties.
The petition to the high court noted, “This court has already considered the direct method of compliance and concluded that it imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise and violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
One looming question is whether or not the First Amendment allow HHS “to discriminate among nonprofit religious employers who share the same sincere religious objections to the contraceptive mandate by exempting some religious employers while insisting that others comply.”
It explains the government really has no right to “second-guess” the sincerely held religious beliefs of the nuns.
“Judges telling nuns how to analyze moral complicity … cannot be reconciled with this court’s substantial burden jurisprudence,” the brief explains. “It is not within the judicial function and judicial competence to inquire whether someone who sincerely objects to a law on religious grounds has correctly perceived the commands of his … faith.”
