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For Immediate Release: January 24, 2014Media Contact: Emily Hardman, ehardman@becketfund.org, 202.349.7224Washington, D.C. – Today the Little Sisters of the Poor received an injunction from the Supreme Court protecting them from the controversial HHS mandate while their case is before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The injunction means that the Little Sisters will not be forced to sign and deliver the controversial government forms authorizing and instructing their benefits administrator to provide contraceptives, sterilization, and drugs and devices that may cause early abortions (see video). The Court’s order also provides protection to more than 400 other Catholic organizations that receive...

<p>Little Sisters of the Poor. Courtesy of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.</p> <p>Washington D.C., Jan 14, 2014 / 04:34 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The editors of USA Today have urged the Obama administration to stop trying to require the Little Sisters of the Poor to abide by the federal contraception mandate in violation of their religious beliefs.</p>

.....Generally, for almost 230 years, the federal government left us alone to choose freely our religious practices and to worship as we believe. Until now. Today, the free exercise of religion is under attack by the government. When Congress enacted the Affordable Health Care Act -- I prefer to call it ObamaCare because it is President Obama’s brainchild, his signature legislation, and because there is nothing affordable about it -- members of Congress must have known that the law would impose obligations upon persons that would force them to engage in behavior in violation of their religious beliefs. snip His...

Many of you have heard about the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nuns providing care for the elderly, who  are now taking on the Obama Administration over the Affordable Care Act's (ObamaCare) contraception mandate. Religious exemptions from the ObamaCare contraception mandate are often made for government-approved entities, but the Obama Administration has deemed the nuns, who work exclusively with the elderly, unworthy of an exception. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently granted the Little Sisters of the Poor a temporary injunction, so they do not have to violate their religious beliefs by offering health insurance that...

People forget it now, but the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — the law that companies and nonprofit organizations are using to fight the Obama administration’s requirement that almost all employers cover contraception, sterilization, and drugs that may cause abortion in their insurance plans — was controversial among conservatives in its first years. The old debate over it should remind us of two truths that, while compatible, are in tension with each other: The principle for which conservatives are fighting in today’s cases is important, and it is not absolute.The story starts in the 1980s, when two drug counselors in...

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...

The US Justice Department on Friday asked the Supreme Court to throw out a challenge from a nuns' group against a birth control mandate in the Obamacare health reform law. The Little Sisters of the Poor had asked the US high court to exempt it from the controversial birth control clause, saying that providing birth control was contrary to its religious beliefs. The US government, in its written response, asked the court to lift the temporary block on birth control, arguing that the provision does not apply to the nuns anyway. The Little Sisters' lawsuit is "not about the availability...

A resident and a sister arrange flowers at the Little Sisters of the Poor's Mullen Home in Denver, CO in this undated file photo. Credit: El Pueblo Catolico/James Baca. Washington D.C., Jan 3, 2014 / 05:57 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Despite the claims of the U.S. Justice Department, the demands of the federal contraception mandate threaten the continued works of service performed by the Little Sisters of the Poor, their attorneys say. Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the religious sisters in court, charged that the government's claim amounts to “doublespeak” and...

Supreme Court Halts Contraception Mandate For Religious Groups By M. Alex Johnson and Winston Wilde, NBC News Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a last-ditch plea from Catholic groups Tuesday night to block a birth control mandate in the new health care law for religious organizations, just hours before it was to have gone into effect. The archdioceses of Washington, D.C., and Nashville, Tenn., the Catholic Conference of Michigan and several affiliated groups requested the emergency stay of provisions of the Affordable Care Act that would require companies — regardless of religious beliefs — to provide contraceptives and other abortion-inducing...

Yesterday, Judge Brian Cogan of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, not only struck down Obamacare's contraception mandate as applied to religious non-profit organizations, but also sent a strong signal that federal courts were losing patience with President Obama's many stitches of executive power. Previous courts had ruled against President Obama's contraception mandate as applied to for-profit entities (see Sebelius v Hobby Lobby), but this was the first court to hold that participating in Obama's scheme to provide free birth control is a substantial burden on the free practice of religion (specifically the Catholic...

<p>The Supreme Court has turned away a Christian university's attempt to overturn a key part of the Obama administration's health care law.</p> <p>The justices did not comment Monday in leaving in place a federal appeals court ruling dismissing Liberty University's lawsuit.</p>

Rights: The Supreme Court will hear a challenge by a Christian-owned store chain against the HHS birth-control mandate that requires businesses to provide contraception coverage, a violation of religious conscience. Some 16 months after the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare as a constitutional form of taxation, some 40 for-profit companies are about to find out its constitutionality on another front — whether they must cover some or all forms of birth control if doing so would violate their religious beliefs. The nation's highest court has agreed to hear the federal government's appeal of a June decision by the U.S. 10th Circuit...

While Barack Obama has often been compared to leaders of the past, it's unlikely anyone has yet associated him with Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Ruler of the Seleucid Empire between 175 and 164 B.C., King Antiochus is best known for the persecution of Jews, and one story from the second book of Maccabees is particularly relevant here. As the passage tells us, the king was bent on forcing a Jewish woman and her seven sons to, of all things, eat pork. The boys resisted and were tortured and killed one by one as their mother, who ultimately was also murdered, looked...

In the most prominent challenge of its kind, Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. asked a federal appeals court Thursday for an exemption from part of the federal health care law that requires it to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morning-after pill. The Oklahoma City-based arts-and-crafts chain argued that businesses — not just the currently exempted religious groups — should be allowed to seek exception from that section of the health law if it violates their religious beliefs.

On MSNBC this afternoon, Sandra Fluke truly outdid herself, attempting to argue that the people who disagree with the contraception mandate on religious freedom grounds are in the same category as people who oppose insurance coverage for leukemia. Just...watch: Sandra Fluke: Opponents to Contraception Mandate Have 'Very Extreme Ideas About What's important to note is that some of the folks who are continuing to object to this policy are actually worried about employers who are private companies, not religiously affiliated employers in any way, but the boss has a particular religious concern, and they want to be able to deny...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Wednesday that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was “waging war on the Catholic Church”—an apparent reference to the Obamacare regulation she finalized earlier this year that requires nearly all health-care plans to offer sterilizations, contraceptives, and abortion-inducing drugs free of charge. “This secretary of HHS is a radical. She is waging war on the Catholic Church. She’s adopted radical positions on a range of issues,” Gingrich said during a conference call on Wednesday. … In its lawsuit against the HHS and Sebelius, the Archdiocese of New York cited similar comments made...

President Obama has become an expert at making phony claims and exploiting bogus issues. On the energy front, who can forget his claim that we’d have no need for new oil production or exploration if we simply kept our tires properly inflated and got regular tune-ups? Now it’s fuel made from algae, a technology that is, at best, decades away and will probably be just as cost-ineffective as ethanol. The president’s phony issue du jour is the Republican Party’s alleged war on women. The issue’s roots were planted at the Jan. 7 Republican primary debate in New Hampshire. ABC News'...

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has a fascinating interview with New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in which the president of the US bishops’ conference discusses the interactions he’s had with President Barack Obama over the last several months regarding the birth-control mandate handed down by the Department of Health and Human Services. Dolan describes the 45-minute meeting he had with Obama last November, at which he understood the president to say that the Catholic Church’s religious freedoms would be protected as the health-care law was implemented: “I said, ‘I’ve heard you say, first of all, that you have immense...

While opposition to the HHS mandate has caused many liberals to accuse Republicans of a “war on women,” the Obama administration itself has just declared the first front in its own war on women’s health care. Its casus belli? The Texas government’s restriction on funding for abortion providers. As of last week, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services has withdrawn $30 million worth of funding from a Texas Medicaid program that provides health-care services for low-income women. This HHS policy begins to confirm what conservatives have suspected all along: While the Obama administration has made it clearer than...

A Missouri business owner says his right to religious freedom is being threatened.ST. LOUIS (CNA/EWTN News)—A Missouri business owner has become the first employer of a for-profit, secular company to bring a lawsuit challenging the Obama administration’s contraception mandate. “Religious liberty is not limited to institutions,” said attorney Francis Manion, who says his client believes the administration is forcing him to violate his conscience under the new federal rule. Manion told CNA on March 15 that the lawsuit is important for private business owners because it asserts that “they too have religious rights, and the government has to respect those...