Obama Admin Told Catholic Nuns They Must Offer Free Abortion Drugs

The Obama administration told the Supreme Court that nuns running an elder-care facility should have to provide “free” abortion drugs through their health-insurance plan. Witness your tax dollars at work.

There is hope, though, that your hard-earned pay won’t be wasted on absurdities like this much longer. Religious freedom is so embedded in American law that Obamacare has suffered court orders against its mandate in 53 of 60 rulings so far.

Yet despite having many opportunities to promote abortion without involving people of faith, the Obama administration refuses to cut its losses. Instead it has doubled down ferociously – insisting on coercing even nuns to participate in its anti-life, anti-religious agenda.

In the first wave of the abortion-pill-mandate debate, President Obama promised Christian leaders that the rule would exempt religious groups. But the abortion extremists had their way and the White House “evolved” on the issue. The 2012 election year “solution” was to tell religious groups they would, in the words of Cardinal Dolan, get an extra year delay in order to “figure out how to violate [their] consciences.”

Then the Obama administration walked into court against religious families who earn a living in business. It insisted that those job-creating families don’t possess religious freedom. The government has deemed the world of business and healthcare “secular,” where religion is not allowed.

The administration had tried a similar maneuver the previous year at the Supreme Court, where it lost 9-0 arguing that education is inherently secular and that religious schools don’t have special First Amendment protection. But even a colossal failure like that doesn’t dissuade true believers.

So despite losing 35 of 41 cases so far against job-creating religious families, the Obama administration went on to declare that religious ministries aren’t religious enough to be considered “religious employers.” Instead the administration concocted a phony “accommodation.” This alleged compromise forced groups that provide insurance to their employees to transform that insurance into a free coupon for abortion pills and contraception. The government told the religious groups this accounting gimmick should satisfy their consciences, because government gets to decide what conscience means.

This led the Little Sisters of the Poor, after long reluctance, to sue the federal government to avoid being co-opted into the Obama administration’s abortion and contraception agenda. The administration’s response to their lawsuit has been its haughtiest move yet.

It declared in court that it didn’t understand its own “accommodation,” and that suddenly it had discovered that the accommodation might not apply in the same way to the Little Sisters.

This brings us to the government’s brief. The government actually misrepresents the facts before the Supreme Court. It asserts that all the Little Sisters have to do is file a form saying “they are non-profit organizations that hold themselves out as religious and have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services.”

That’s untrue. The government deliberately added more language to the Little Sisters’ form. Because their plan is “self-insured,” in addition to stating their religious objection, the government requires their form to also specifically tell their insurance administrator that he has “obligations” to provide the abortifacient and contraceptive coverage himself.

The government added this language on purpose because it wanted to force self-insured entities to create a binding contractual duty for someone else to provide abortion pills – through the religious group’s own health plan – when the religious group doesn’t want to do that itself. Thus the government’s “compromise” for self-insured groups is akin to telling them: Don’t worry, you don’t have to assassinate that guy, you just have to contract a hit man to do it.

At this point the administration’s position went from the absurd to the surreal. The government now says that the Little Sisters must still submit their form. The form still requires the Sisters to explicitly tell someone else they have “obligations” to provide abortion pills and contraception. But the government says it overlooked the fact that the Little Sisters’ plan fits into a legal loophole where, if that third party abortion-pill guy doesn’t follow his “obligations,” there’s no penalty on him.

In other words, the Obama administration refuses to grant an injunction that would protect the Sisters from hiring someone else to do offensive things, and its refusal is based on the theory that the government’s coerced speech probably won’t work anyway. The government admits that its offensive coerced speech might not actually achieve the government’s goals, but the Little Sisters must speak it anyway.

The Obama administration has fought all the way to the Supreme Court to force the Little Sisters to do something that the government insists is pointless. If it’s pointless, the federal government shouldn’t be forcing people to do it against their will in the first place. But that lesson applies to all of Obamacare, and it seems that the administration just can’t resist the temptation to coerce.

NOTRE DAME PROFESSOR ON OBAMACARE

THE CHRISTIAN POST ^ | 11/20/2013 | Laura Hollis

Obamacare Should Remind Us We Are Not ‘Subjects,’ We Are People Laura Hollis is a professor at the University of Notre Dame November 20, 2013

http://www.christianpost.com/news/obamacare-should-remind-us-we-are-not-subjects-we-are-people-109165/

• Laura Hollis is a professor at the University of Notre Dame

The unveiling of the dictatorial debacle that is Obamacare absolutely flabbergasts me. It is stunning on so many levels, but the most shocking aspect of it for me is watching millions of free Americans stand idly by while this man, his minions in Congress and his cheerleaders in the press systematically dismantle our Constitution, steal our money, and crush our freedoms.

• The President, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (with no small help from Justice John Roberts) take away our health care, and we allow it.

• They take away our insurance, and we allow it.

• They take away our doctors, and we allow it.

• They charge us thousands of dollars more a year, and we allow it.

• They make legal products illegal, and we allow it.

• They cripple our businesses, and we allow it. • They announce by fiat that we must ignore our most deeply held beliefs – and we allow it.

Where is your spine, America ? Yes, I know people are complaining. I read the news on the internet. I read blogs.

I have a Twitter feed. So what? People in the Soviet Union complained. People in Cuba complain. People in China complain (quietly). Complaining isn’t the same thing as doing anything about it. In fact, much of the complaining that we hear sounds like resignation: Wow. This sucks. Oh well, this is the way things are. Too bad. Perhaps you need reminding of a few important facts. Here goes:

1. The President is not a king. Barack Obama does not behave like a President, an elected official, someone who realizes that he works for us. He behaves like a king, a dictator – someone who believes that his own pronouncements have the force of law, and who thinks he can dispense with the law’s enforcement when he deigns to do so. And those of us who object? How dare we? Racists!

And while he moves steadily “forward” with his plans to “fundamentally transform” the greatest country in human history, he distracts people with cheap, meaningless trivialities, like “free birth control pills”! (In fact, let’s face it: this administration’s odd obsession with sex in general - Birth control! Abortion! Sterilization! Gay guys who play basketball! — is just plain weird. Since when did the leader of the free world care so much about how people have sex, who they have it with, and what meds they use when they have it? Does he have nothing more important to concern himself with?)

2. It isn’t just a failed software program; it is a failed philosophy. People are marveling that Healthcare.gov was such a spectacular failure. Well, if one is only interested in it as a product launch, I’ve explained some of the reasons for that here. But the larger point is that it isn’t a software failure, or even a product failure; it is a philosophy failure.

I have said this before: Obama is not a centrist; he is a central planner. And this – all of it: the disastrous computer program, the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted, the lies, the manipulation of public opinion, the theft of the public’s money and property, and freedom (read insurance, and premiums, and doctors) — IS what central planning looks like. The central premise of central planning is that a handful of wunderkinds with your best interests at heart (yeah, right) know better than you what’s good for you. The failure of such a premise and the misery it causes have been clear from the dawn of humanity.

Kings and congressmen, dictators and Dear Leaders, potentates, princes and presidents can all fall prey to the same imperial impulses: “we know what is good the ‘the people.’ And they are always wrong.

There is a reason that the only times communism has really been tried have been after wars, revolutions, or coups d’état. You have to have complete chaos for people to be willing to accept the garbage that centralized planning produces. Take the Soviet Union , for example. After two wars, famine, and the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, why wouldn’t people wait in line for hours to buy size 10 shoes? Or settle for the gray matter that passed for meat in the grocery stores?

But communism’s watered-down cousin, socialism, isn’t much better. Ask the Venezuelans who cannot get toilet paper.

Toilet paper. ¡Viva la Revolución! Contrary to what so many who believe in a “living Constitution” say, the Founding Fathers absolutely understood this. That is why the Constitution was set up to limit government power. (Memo to the President: the drafters of the Constitution deliberately didn’t say “what government had to do on your behalf.”) They understood that that was the path to folly, fear, and famine.)

3. Obama is deceitful. Just as the collapse of the computer program should not surprise anyone, neither should we be shocked that the President lied about his healthcare plan. Have any of you been paying attention over the past few years? Obama has made no secret of his motivations or his methods.

The philosophies which inspire him espouse deceit and other vicious tactics. (Don’t take my word for it: read Saul Alinsky.) Obama infamously told reporter Richard Wolffe, “You know, I actually believe my own bullshit.”

He has refused to be forthcoming about his past (where are his academic records?). His own pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, told author Ed Klein, that Obama said to him, “You know what your problem is? You have to tell the truth.” Did Obama lie when he said dozens of times, “If you like you plan, you can keep it. Period!”? Of course he did. That’s what he does.

4. The media is responsible. And had the media been doing their jobs, we would have known a lot of this much, much earlier. The press is charged with the sacred responsibility of protecting the people from the excesses of government.

Our press has been complicit, incompetent, or corrupt. Had they vetted this man in 2008, as they would have a Republican candidate, we would have known far more about him than we do, even now.

Had they pressed for more details about Obamacare, Congress’ feet would have been held to the fire. Had they done their jobs about Eric Holder, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, NSA spying - or any of the other myriad betrayals of the public trust that this administration has committed, Obama would likely have lost his 2012 reelection campaign. (A fact that even The Washington Post has tacitly acknowledged. Well done, fellas! Happy now?) Instead, they turned a blind eye, even when they knew he was lying, abusing power, disregarding the limits of the Constitution. It was only when he began to spy on them, and when the lies were so blatant that the lowest of low-information voters could figure it out that they realized they had to report on it. (Even in the face of blatant, deliberate and repeated lies, The New York Times has the audacity to tell us that the President “misspoke.”) They have betrayed us, abandoned us, and deceived us.

5. Ted Cruz was right. So was Sarah Palin. The computer program is a disaster. The insurance exchanges are a disaster. What’s left? The healthcare system itself. And this, of necessity, will be a disaster, too. Millions of people have lost their individual insurance plans. In 2015, millions more will lose their employer-provided coverage (a fact which the Obama administration also knew, and admitted elsewhere).

The exorbitant additional costs that Obamacare has foisted on unsuspecting Americans are all part of a plan of wealth confiscation and redistribution. That is bad enough. But it will not end there. When the numbers of people into the system and the corresponding demand for care vastly exceed the cost projections (and they will, make no mistake), then the rationing will start. Not only choice at that point, but quality and care itself will go down the tubes. And then will come the decisions made by the Independent Payment Advisory Board about what care will be covered (read “paid for”) and what will not.

That’s just a death panel, put politely. In fact, progressives are already greasing the wheels for acceptance of that miserable reality as well. They’re spreading the lie that it will be about the ability of the dying to refuse unwanted or unhelpful care. Don’t fall for that one, either. It will be about the deaths that inevitably result from decisions made by people other than the patients, their families, and their physicians. (Perhaps it’s helpful to think of their assurances this way: “If you like your end-of-life care, you can keep your end-of-life-care.”)

6. We are not SUBJECTS. (or, Nice Try, the Tea Party Isn’t Going Away). We have tolerated these incursions into our lives and livelihoods too long already. There is no end to the insatiable demand “progressives” have to remake us in their image. Today it is our insurance, our businesses, our doctors, our health care. Tomorrow some new crusade will be announced that enables them to take over other aspects of our formerly free lives.

I will say it again: WE ARE NOT SUBJECTS. Not only is the Tea Party right on the fiscal issues, but it appears that they are more relevant than ever. We fought a war once to prove we did not want to be the subjects of a king, and the Boston Tea Party was just a taste of the larger conflict to come. If some people missed that lesson in history class, we can give them a refresher. The 2014 elections are a good place to start. Call your representative, your senator, your candidate and tell them: “We are not subjects. You work for us. And if the word “REPEAL” isn’t front and center in your campaign, we won’t vote for you. Period.”

Laura Hollis is an attorney and teaches entrepreneurship and business law at the University of Notre Dame . She resides in Indiana with her husband and two children.

Finally, someone who thinks like me In this country many people have always talked about the “banana republics” (referring mostly to Central and South American countries), their revolutions, their coup d’etats, etc. But when the governments act like they have in those countries, usually that is the ONLY way to get rid of them.

In this country, up to 2008, that was not the case but since then it is rapidly going that route and the natives are not used to it nor prepared to fight it effectively. Most of those natives (and sadly quite a few natives of those banana republics) naively believe in the “checks and balances” which the usurper is quietly but swiftly doing away with.

I repeat Professor Hollis words: “Where is your spine, America ?”

In case someone wants to write, her address is lhollis@nd.edu

Obama vs. the Little Sisters

JANUARY 7, 2014

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/367712/print

By the bizarre logic of the White House, the nuns are part of the “war on women.”

By Rich Lowry

It takes some doing to get embroiled in a court fight with nuns who provide hospice care for the indigent. Amazingly, the Obama administration has managed it.

Its legal battle with the Little Sisters of the Poor is the logical consequence of Obamacare’s conscience-trampling contraception mandate. The requirement went into effect January 1, but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a New Year’s Eve injunction against enforcing it on the Little Sisters.

They are Catholic nuns who follow the doctrinal teachings of the church and therefore oppose contraceptive and abortive drugs and sterilization, all of which Obamacare mandates that employers cover in their insurance plans.

Given the ongoing delays, waivers, and exemptions associated with the law, it would seem natural simply to let the Little Sisters go about their business of pouring out their hearts for the sick and dying.

But this is a fight the administration won’t walk away from. For this White House, it is a matter of principle. And the principle is that the state trumps the convictions of people with deep-held religious beliefs.

When the contraception mandate first caused an uproar, the administration contrived a so-called accommodation for religiously oriented groups (actual churches have always been exempt). But whoever crafted it had a sick sense of humor. The very same document by which a group registers its moral objection to contraceptives and abortifacients also authorizes the insurer to cover them for the group’s employees. What the accommodation gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.

The Little Sisters refuse to sign such a document. They happen to be in an unusual situation because they get their insurance from another religiously affiliated organization opposed to contraceptives and abortifacients, so it may be that these drugs don’t get covered no matter what. But the Little Sisters can’t be sure of this — the regulations are complicated and subject to change.

Regardless, they don’t want to sign. They want no part in authorizing coverage of contraceptive or abortive drugs. Enthusiasts for the mandate scoff. What the nuns are objecting to, they insist, is just a piece of paper.

Just a piece of paper? So is a mortgage. So is a wedding certificate. So is a will. How would the board of directors of NARAL react if the government forced them to sign a “piece of paper” tacitly condemning contraception or abortion? Would they shrug it off as a mere formality?

The Little Sisters deserve deference. Their religious sensibility is different from — and, one hazards to say, more finely tuned than — that of the mandarins of President Barack Obama’s administrative state. In a dispute over what their conscience tells them to do or not to do, the Little Sisters are better positioned to know than anyone else.

Besides, who is harmed if the Little Sisters don’t provide contraception coverage? They are a voluntary organization. They aren’t imposing their views on anyone. Who, for that matter, is harmed if a secular organization run by people with moral objections to contraceptives and abortifacients refuses to cover them? Employees are still free to go out on their own and get contraceptives, which are widely available. If this sounds like an outlandish imposition, it is what people managed to do throughout American history all the way up to last week.

The contraception mandate has always had a strong ideological impetus. Opponents of the mandate “want to roll back the last 50 years in progress women have made in comprehensive health care in America,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius notoriously declared in 2011. “We’ve come a long way in women’s health over the last few decades, but we are in a war.” By this bizarre way of thinking, a small congregation of nuns that cares for the most vulnerable is somehow complicit in a war on women’s health.

Instead of respecting the moral views of the Little Sisters, the administration hopes to grind them under foot by force of law. For shame.

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