By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD
Well, I guess there is nothing stopping the Tolerant Left from trying to force the Little Sisters of the Poor into violating their religious beliefs by providing contraception, abortion, and sterilization coverage, among other evils. In fact, there is a decided effort by the left to eviscerate the conscience rights of anyone who does not embrace the left’s high sacrament styled as “reproductive freedom.”
This issue, of course, arises out of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare. Interestingly, the ACA does not require coverage of the above-mentioned sacrament. It does, however, authorize the executive branch to provide for “such additional preventive care and screenings” as deemed necessary, which it did. Thus the requirements for such coverage came, not from Congress, but from the agencies controlled by President Obama.
The requirement that covered employers must provide certain medical care without cost or copay to employees naturally raised the hackles of religious (real religions, not the faux religion of the left) employers who claimed that the requirements of those administrative rules violated the tenets of their faith. Prominent among them was the Little Sisters of the Poor. To refresh everybody’s memory, the Little Sisters is a Catholic order of nuns who care for the elderly poor. It was founded in France by Jeanne Jugan for that purpose in 1839.
Finding themselves between a rock and a hard place, the Little Sisters turned to the courts for relief from the Obama’s administrative burden (comply or pay heavy fines) and won a unanimous victory in the Supreme Court in 2016. After taking office in January of 2017, President Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to write an exemption from the contraceptive mandate for the Little Sisters and other religious organizations thus affected.
Win one for the good guys — or gals, as the case may be.
But hold on to your hats! The progressives, who included Democrat attorneys general from numerous states, went to court to protect the sacred sacraments of the left. The results were injunctions issued against the new HHS religious exemptions, one in California which applied to the entire Ninth Circuit and a nationwide injunction from a Pennsylvania federal court. Both injunctions have been upheld by their respective appellate courts.
The Little Sisters, God bless them, aren’t taking this lying down. With the help of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, they are fighting back, taking the Pennsylvania case to the Supreme Court and likely taking the California case there as well. They’ve had a little more time with the Pennsylvania case, but in California the Ninth Circuit ruled only last month that the Trump administration’s rules were “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with the law.”
It also ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) — which, by the way, will be statutorily irrelevant if Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Equality Act, which passed the House on a party-line vote, ever becomes law — does not apply since the procedures for exemption from the rule do not sufficiently burden the rights of the Little Sisters.
One of the reasons for that holding is that, according to the 2-1 majority, RFRA doesn’t apply because it contradicts the congressional intent that all women should be covered for the objected-to procedures. Of course, Congress didn’t do that; it allowed the administrative process to do it.
And the reason why the exemption does not burden the Little Sisters’ beliefs is that it requires them to sign-off on a waiver that is then presented to its insurance company which forces the insurer to cover the services. In other words, the Little Sisters would have to, in effect, approve payment by their insurer, something the nuns simply won’t do.
Conscience is something that the court apparently didn’t understand.
The dissent, of course, caught the point that the issue was about an administrative regulation and not a directive from Congress. “The Affordable Care Act does not say a word about contraception or sterilization services for women. Congress delegated to the executive branch the entire matter of ‘such additional preventive care and screenings’ as the executive agencies might choose to provide for. . . . In 2011, the agencies (not Congress) issued the guideline applying the no-cost sharing statutory provision to contraceptive and sterilization services.”
“It has been six long years since we began our legal battle against government mandates that threaten our ministry,” said Mother Loraine Marie Maguire, on the decision to appeal the Pennsylvania nationwide injunction to the top court. “We hope we have finally reached the end of this arduous process, and that the Supreme Court will reaffirm their previous decision, and that we will soon be able to keep our focus on the elderly poor.”
So the war goes on and a brave group of nuns is leading the charge. The end, if there is an end to this, will probably not come from the courts, but from the election. I think it’s fairly easy to see on which side each candidate supports and what kind of judges we can expect from them.
In the “College What?” department, two blurbs sadly indicate where our institutions of higher learning are heading:
The student government association (SGA) at Trinity University in Texas is refusing to help fund a talk by conservative Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and bestselling author of The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. The unanimous decision by the student group came after it took issue with the assumed content of Mac Donald’s presentation.
“It is quite ironic that the YCT (Young Conservatives of Texas) tried to bring Heather Mac Donald to talk about how college campuses need to be more open-minded and tolerant, only to be denied funding by Trinity’s SGA because the SGA did not want her point of view on campus,” said YCT President Julia Westwick.
And at New York University, the editor of the student newspaper pulled an ad promoting a conservative event on campus sponsored by the school’s College Republicans and the American Enterprise Institute, which featured Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of The National Review, about his new book The Case for Nationalism: How it Made Us Powerful, United, and Free.
Sakshi Venkatraman, editor-in-chief of The Washington Square News, said she pulled the ad, which had been approved by the paper’s business team, because “the ad’s pro-nationalist message does not align with the values of our paper. . . . The word ‘nationalism,’ as it exists in today’s political lexicon, connotes xenophobia and white supremacy.”
The rejected ad promoting Lowry’s talk was to have said, “Lowry . . . comes to NYU to discuss why nationalism is not the same thing as fascism, racism, or militarism. Rather, nationalism is part of the mainstream of the American tradition and has made this country great.”
Apparently, that was too much for Venkatraman and company to stomach. Bobby Miller, vice president of the student Republicans, said the decision to remove the ad was a suppression of free speech.
Thus, the Tolerant Left that runs many of our colleges and universities has a new interpretation of the First Amendment: Speech is free only if you agree with me!
(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com.)
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