Posted on 02/09/2012 10:33:57 AM PST by topher
HANCEVILLE, Alabama, February 9, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Lawyers for the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) say that the broadcasting network has taken the Obama administration to court over a mandate forcing Catholic employers to pay for birth control, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty announced that it had filed suit Thursday morning on behalf of EWTN, considered the largest religious media network in the world.
“The federal government cannot force people to violate their religion like this,” said Mark Rienzi, Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund and a constitutional law professor at the Catholic University of America. “Mother Angelica founded EWTN to spread the teachings of the Catholic Church—not to betray them.”
(Excerpt) Read more at lifesitenews.com ...
EWTN stands for the Eternal Word Television Network
Bless you Mother Angelica!
Hate to comment before reading article, but now is the time to really press the ineligibility issue; it is becoming clear to everyone once you let the eligibility issue go then the rest of the law does not matter, especially to this fascist fraud we are dealing with. The elites have perpetrated this fraud, let’s get our country back!
Bless you Mother Angelica!
_________________________________________________
Amen! And I’m Protestant! This affects all of us.
Hope this is the first of many lawsuits filed, and that litigants include multiple religions offended by this. This is yet another attack on the freedom.
EWTN has details of the lawsuit with a press release:
EWTN also has a petition to sign:
Petition is through organization that is suing Obama Administration:
I Believe Petition: Take Action to Defend Religious Liberty
Petition is on the BecketFund.Org WebSite
Ruh-Roh, getting an internet explorer can not display message for LifeSitenews.com and on lifesite.net when I click on the story I get a forbidden message.
The Catholic Church needs to excommunicate high-profile pro-aborts like Nancy Pelosi RIGHT NOW!
The Evangelical Church needs to do the same to hi-profile members of their congregations.
In fact, excommunication for just for supporting abortion supporters, and gay “marriage” supporters, should have commenced a LONG time ago.
Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them
Ephesians 5:11
When a small majority of statist idealogues takeover healthcare under the banner of, “we need to pass this bill to find out what’s in it”, we have lost our liberty.
Now, we are slowly finding “what’s in it” and this nation is learning about tryanny — up close and personal. Hat tip Mr. Levin.
Excerpt:
Irondale, AL (EWTN) – EWTN Global Catholic Network filed a lawsuit February 9 in U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Alabama against the Department of Health & Human Services, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and other government agencies seeking to stop the imposition of the contraception mandate as well as asking the court for a declaratory judgment that the mandate is unconstitutional. EWTN is the first Catholic organization to file suit since the final HHS rules were published by the Obama administration on January 20, 2012."We had no other option but to take this to the courts," says EWTN President and CEO Michael P. Warsaw. "Under the HHS mandate, EWTN is being forced by the government to make a choice: either we provide employees coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs and violate our conscience or offer our employees and their families no health insurance coverage at all. Neither of those choices is acceptable."
The lawsuit was filed on EWTN's behalf by Mark Rienzi, Kyle Duncan, and Erik Kniffin from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
"We are taking this action to defend not only ourselves but also to protect other institutions – Catholic and non-Catholic, religious and secular – from having this mandate imposed upon them," Warsaw continued. "The government is forcing EWTN, first, to inform its employees about how to get contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs, a concept known as forced speech. To make the matter worse, the government then will force EWTN to use its donors' funds to pay for these same morally objectionable procedures or to pay for the huge fines it will levy against us if we fail to provide health care insurance. There is no question that this mandate violates our First Amendment rights. This is a moment when EWTN, as a Catholic organization, has to step up and say that enough is enough. Our hope is that our lawsuit does just that."
The Becket Fund previously filed similar lawsuits on behalf of Belmont Abbey College, a small Catholic liberal arts college in Belmont, N.C., and Colorado Christian University, an interdenominational Christian liberal arts university near Denver, which demonstrates that this is not just a Catholic issue. Both suits were filed prior to the HHS rules being finalized in January.
EXCELLENT news! And....we are going to see more of the same.
Related:
By the way, I just heard on the radio driving home that religious groups are planning to turn out in big numbers at the Meeting of the Board of Trustees regarding the freedom of religion issue at Vanderbilt!
;-)))
I did too.
On the EWTN site I read this good news:
The Becket Fund has a 17-year history of defending religious liberty for people of all faiths. Its attorneys are recognized as experts in the field of church-state law, and they recently won a 9-0 victory against the federal government at the U.S. Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC.
If my Jesus tattoo became infected, would a Muslim doctor or hospital be forced to treat me?
Yes. An ineligible president’s laws cannot stand.
I have no pity for the Catholic church after they gleefully sided with Obamacare and continually allow festering pro-abortion “Catholics” like Pelosi in their midst. They need to man-up or gtfo. Excommunicate the liberal scum.
Good for them! Some people wonder whether or not Obama knew what he was getting into, taking on the Church in this way. I don’t think he realized the extent to which people would go and that such a large number of Catholics would fight back. He probably figured after he watched Notre Dame have little old ladies and priests arrested for protesting Obama’s commencement speech that not enough Catholics took their religion seriously anymore. He was wrong.
And we will concurrently find out whether the public is OK with "what's in it."
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