Not Tired of Winning Yet CXXXIII
In a 7-2 decision, the high court in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania made it abundantly clear that the federal government has the authority to guard against the Affordable Care Act’s “contraceptive mandate” trampling the rights of religious objectors. Put simply, this means that religious employers will not be forced to supply their women employees with abortion pills that kill unborn life.
In fact, the Trump administration had already tried to exempt religious objectors from the ACA abortion pills mandate. But, as we shall see, the abortion industry fought back with a vengeance, and managed to block the exemption. Wednesday’s decision allows the administration’s rule to take effect. Pro-abortion campaigners have now run out of options. This is a decisive victory for freedom of religion.
“We are overjoyed that, once again, the Supreme Court has protected our right to serve the elderly without violating our faith,” said Mother Loraine Marie Maguire of the Little Sisters in a statement July 8.
“Our life’s work and great joy is serving the elderly poor and we are so grateful that the contraceptive mandate will no longer steal our attention from our calling.”
The Little Sisters’ victory at the Supreme Court on Wednesday comes nine years into their legal fight against the Obama-era “contraception mandate” which obliges employers to provide cost-free coverage for contraceptives, sterilizations, and “emergency birth control” in employee health plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
In 2017, the Trump administration granted a religious and moral exemption to the mandate for the sisters and other objecting groups, but then states including Pennsylvania and California filed lawsuits saying that the burden of providing coverage was being shifted onto the states and claiming that the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act in setting up the exemption.
On Wednesday, the court found that the Trump administration “had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption,” and “that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects.”
Mark Rienzi, president of Becket, the religious freedom legal group which represented the sisters, said Wednesday that “America deserves better than petty governments harassing nuns.”
My comment:
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a society of nuns who help elderly and dying people not be alone in their last hours, was harassed and hated by the Dems, because the sisters asked not to be forced, in the name of medical equality or social somethingorother, to fund contraceptives and aborticides in the insurance covering their members.
The two justices who voted against this ruling must be impeached.
This is not a matter where there is any difference of opinion: any judge who cannot see with startling clarity that the entire body of Anglo-American law cannot now and never could support a law requiring nuns to murder babies is unfit for office.
Here the opening paragraph of the dissent:
In accommodating claims of religious freedom, this Court has taken a balanced approach, one that does not allow the religious beliefs of some to overwhelm the rights and interests of others who do not share those beliefs. … Today, for the first time, the Court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree.
And, in the next paragraph:
Destructive of the Women’s Health Amendment, this Court leaves women workers to fend for themselves, to seek contraceptive coverage from sources other than their employer’s insurer, and, absent another available source of funding, to pay for contraceptive services out of their own pockets. The Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause, all agree, does not call for that imbalanced result.
I realize many of my readers are not lawyers, and have not read countless pages of judicial opinion. You may not be aware. Judges are not supposed to talk this way.
“casts totally aside …?” “to the nth degree…?”
This is not judicial opinion. This is overblown rhetoric of the most vapid and reckless sort. It is a political speech, and has no part of anything done on the bench.
Ginsburg and Sotomayor must go.
The insanity involved must come from Hell, because there is no earthly argument, no possible material reason, where any sort of justice or common sense is served by forcing elderly nuns whose mission is to comfort the dying to buy contraceptives and aborticides. It was done merely to drive a jackboot heel into the wrinkled, kindly faces of bewildered old ladies, who, perhaps, thought that the magistrates of the state had a duty to use the sword to protect their natural rights from invasion, including their freedom to obey God.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
