By MIKE MANNO
Well, the folks who run the State of Washington are up to their old tricks again. You might remember that one of our last visits there was to write about the a local florist, Barronelle Stutzman, proprietor of Arlene’s Flowers whom the State Supreme Court found had violated the law when she refused to provide arranged flowers for a “gay wedding” ceremony.
Her problems started when a friend and longtime customer, Robert Ingersoll, asked her to provide flowers for his same-sex wedding. Barronelle, citing her religious beliefs about marriage, declined to provide arranged flowers, but did offer to sell Ingersoll any flowers he wanted.
She would sell the flowers; she just wouldn’t arrange them for him. Ingersoll and his partner then filed a complaint with the appropriate Washington State officials and the result was a final ruling against her.
With the aid of the Alliance Defending Freedom, Barronelle appealed the state court’s ruling to the United State Supreme Court. Fortunately, her case wound up on the Supreme Court’s conference table shortly after the court had ruled against the state of Colorado in a similar case involving a baker. The Supreme Court responded to Barronelle’s case by vacating the state’s judgment and returned the case to the State Supreme Court to review in light of the Colorado ruling.
The State Supreme Court now has the case under consideration and has been deluged by legal briefs from both sides. A court spokesman has indicated that oral arguments would probably be heard this spring. The state, of course, with the help of the ACLU, is standing firm in its opposition to Barronelle.
So while this is going on, leading many — myself included — to conclude that Washington is not a religiously friendly state, lawmakers there passed a bill, and the governor, Jay Inslee, who, by the way, is now running for president (I know because his commercials are all over the airwaves here in Iowa) signed into law. The law, SB 6219, requires all employers who provide health insurance with maternity coverage to also provide insurance with “substantially equivalent coverage to permit the abortion of a pregnancy.”
The law also covers “all contraceptive drugs, devices and other products, approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration, including over-the-counter contraceptive drugs, devices, and products approved” by the FDA. And, it goes further and provides that insurance for these products “may not require copayments, deductibles, or other forms of cost sharing.”
The law applies to all employers who have an employee health plan; including churches! That’s right, it includes churches and nowhere in the bill is there a religious employer exception.
So naturally the state is being sued by — you guessed it — a church: Cedar Park Assembly of God in Kirkland, Wash., to be specific. And our old friends at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who defended Barronelle and the Colorado cake baker, have taken up the fight for the church, filing suit in Federal District Court the eighth of this month. (See The Wanderer, March 21, 2019, p. 7B for a report on this lawsuit.)
“No church should be coerced to pay for abortions, least of all a church that dedicates its ministry to protecting and celebrating life,” said ADF attorney Elissa Graves.
“Cedar Park believes and teaches that every human life begins at conception and is worthy of protection at every point until natural death. Further still, Cedar Park demonstrates its pro-life ethic in tangible ways: partnership with a local pregnancy care center, hosting an annual camp for children in foster care, operating a school that serves over 1,000 students, and ministering to hundreds of couples struggling with infertility.”
In addition to its partnering with a local crisis pregnancy center, and hosting a mobile ultrasound unit on its campus, it has facilitated approximately 1,000 embryo adoptions, the church’s suit claims.
“The State of Washington has no business strong-arming this church, or any other, into contradicting the deeply held beliefs that motivate its ministry,” she added.
“In 2018, the State of Washington acted in concert with Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest abortion provider — and NARAL Pro-Choice Washington to draft, promote, pass, and implement SB 6219, which requires all Washington employers to provide abortion and abortifacient coverage in their employee health plans. SB 6219 contains numerous exemptions; but none of these exemptions are available to churches or other religious institutions,” the church argued in its lawsuit.
The lawsuit points out that with all of its activities, the church employs 185 persons who are eligible for health insurance. And while the church believes that it has a Christian duty to cover its employees with health insurance, it could not, even if it wanted to, drop its insurance to avoid paying for abortions because it is required to provide health insurance under Obamacare. Thus the church is in a no-win situation.
It also claims that SB 6219 contradicts other state statutes. “Under Washington State law, ‘no individual health-care provider, religiously sponsored health carrier, or health-care facility may be required by law or contract in any circumstance to participate in the provisions of or payment for a specific service if they object to so doing for reason of conscience or religion’,” the suit says.
The lawsuit is filed in three counts for the usual arguments made in these cases: First Amendment violation of the Free Exercise Clause; violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. It seeks a declaratory judgment that SB 6219 is unconstitutional, a temporary and permanent injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law, and attorney fees.
Washington State has, it appears, stumbled into a make-shift religion that celebrates the doctrine of political correctness and New Left ideology and all citizens must now bow down to it.
ADF Senior Counsel Kevin Theriot said “Washington State has gone out of its way to bully churches and other religious nonprofits to violate their beliefs by paying for abortions. The Supreme Court has consistently held that government hostility toward people of faith is unconstitutional and has no place in our society. The state’s policy crushes dissent and violates the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause by targeting Cedar Park’s entirely legitimate internal policies and religious beliefs.”
Perhaps it might be a bit easier to understand the state’s religious dogma by a legislative finding: “Access to contraception has been directly connected to the economic success of women and the ability of women to participate in society equally. . . . Restrictions on abortion coverage interfere with a woman’s personal, private pregnancy decision-making.”
It’s always an uphill battle, isn’t it? By the way, just so you know, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists the Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group. And the mainstream media and numerous social media outlets follow the SPLC’s lead on that. Standing up for babies? I guess that makes us all members of a hate group. And now in Washington you can be fined and go to jail for it.
The case was just filed so it will take a while for it to be heard. Stay tuned.
(You can contact Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com.)
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