(WND News Center)—Little Sisters of the Poor is a Catholic church organization that was targeted by Barack Obama’s schemes in Obamacare, in which he tried to force the Christian group to promotion contraception and abortions for employees.
They fought, for years, and won at the Supreme Court. And they won a second time, too.
But two states are defying that precedent, STILL, a decade and a half after the dispute was brought by the Democrat ex-president, and the courts are being asked once again to halt the harassment.
It is Becket that has confirmed the Little Sisters once again are asking a federal appeals court to block “a nationwide ruling that rejected their protection from the federal government’s contraceptive mandate.”
“The fourteen-year legal crusade against the Little Sisters has been needless, grotesque, and un-American,” said Mark Rienzi, president of Becket and lead attorney for the Little Sisters. “The states have no business trying to take away the Little Sisters’ federal civil rights. The Third Circuit should toss the states’ lawsuit into the dustbin of history and uphold the protection the Little Sisters already won at the Supreme Court…twice.”
“Fourteen years ago, the federal Department of Health and Human Services issued a federal mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). This mandate requires employers to provide contraceptives like the week-after pill in their health insurance plans, including some that can cause abortion. The original mandate exempted plans covering tens of millions of people for administrative convenience, but did not provide a religious exemption for groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns who have served the elderly poor for nearly 200 years. After the Little Sisters won protection against the federal government at the Supreme Court in 2016 and in a new federal rule in 2017, Pennsylvania and New Jersey sued to take away that protection,” Becket explained.
It was the high court in 2016 that said the government could not force the contraceptive mandate, and Washington responded with a rule that exempted groups like the Little Sisters.
However, abortion promoters in more than a dozen state governments in multiple cases immediately sued, as they intended to “strong-arm” the group “into either providing contraceptives or paying tens of millions in fines.”
A second trip to the Supreme Court resulted in a second victory for the Little Sisters.
However, Pennsylvania and New Jersey have refused to drop their efforts to take away the Little Sisters’ protection in the lower courts.
“For nearly 200 years, our order has welcomed the elderly poor and dying into our homes as we would welcome Christ Himself,” explained Little Sisters spokeswoman Mother Loraine Marie Maguire. “It is painful that we have spent more than a decade defending that mission in court. We simply want to continue our work without being forced to violate our faith, and we pray Pennsylvania and New Jersey will end this needless harassment.”
A lower court sided with the states’ anti-Christian agenda earlier this year, pushing the religious organization into the federal appeals court docket again.
In a statement to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the lawyers explained, on behalf of the Little Sisters, “For more than a decade, various government actors have tried to force religious objectors to obey a federal contraceptive mandate. As many courts have found—and as the federal government now openly admits— such coercion violates a federal civil rights law known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That is why the federal government stopped requiring religious objectors to comply with the federal contraceptive mandate in 2017. Indeed, presidential administrations of both political parties have now followed this course. Yet the Appellee States maintain that state governments somehow have an interest in forcing the federal government to force religious objectors to comply with the federal contraceptive mandate—even though the federal government need not have any contraceptive mandate at all, and even though the states themselves have chosen not to have such mandates of their own.”
The briefing continued, “When this case was last at the Supreme Court, seven Justices roundly rejected the States’ leading statutory arguments. The court explained that the federal agencies have ‘virtually unbridled discretion’ about what services to include in the contraceptive mandate and what exemptions to create. The court said that its decisions had ‘made it abundantly clear that, under RFRA, the departments must accept the sincerely held complicity-based objections of religious entities.’ The court emphasized that the agencies were not free to tell religious objectors that ‘the connection between what the objecting parties must do and the end that they find morally wrong is simply too attenuated.’ And the court said it had already ‘directed the parties … to ‘accommodate’ the free exercise rights of those with complicity-based objections to the self-certification accommodation.’ Nevertheless, after a four-year stay, and while adjudicating the states’ leftover arguments, the district court again misinterpreted RFRA so badly that it claimed the religious exemption rule was not even ‘rationally connected’ to solving the RFRA problem.
“Worse still, the district court’s analysis purports to revive—and treat as circuit precedent— RFRA analysis from Geneva College that has twice been vacated by the Supreme Court, was based on since-disproven factual claims, and is irreconcilable with the Supreme Court’s most recent opinion in this case. The district court’s statutory errors also lead inexorably to a constitutional conflict, because the original contraceptive mandate cannot constitutionally be re-imposed. The mandate is not a generally applicable law under the court’s recent decisions in Fulton and Tandon. The mandate’s discrimination among religious objectors is flatly unconstitutional under the court’s recent unanimous decision in Catholic Charities Bureau. And the complete lack of standards or principles to constrain agency discretion—what the Supreme Court has already recognized as ‘virtually unbridled discretion’—violates the non-delegation doctrine. These constitutional infirmities mean that the states’ claims are not redressable, because no court could lawfully provide the requested relief. Nor have the states offered any evidence that they have been harmed.”
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