Sound The Trumpet : Another Christian College Wins Injunction Over Birth Control Mandate

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“Another Christian College Wins Injunction Over Birth Control Mandate”
by The Dailer Caller
October 29th, 2014

Another Christian university has won an injunction against the Obama administration’s birth control mandate and its ever-changing exemptions for it.

Ave Maria School of Law, a Catholic law school, first sued the Department of Health and Human Services in 2013 for its “religious accommodation” for religious non-profits who argue Obamacare’s wide mandate that employers must provide 20 kinds of birth control violates their religious beliefs.

Now they won’t be required to comply with the mandate or the Obama administration’s current exemption for religious nonprofits until pending lawsuits against the exemption are ultimately decided, according to a United States District Court in Florida. The school was facing millions in fines that would have taken effect this weekend without the injunction.

The Obama administration has been struggling with setback after setback on its contraceptive mandate. A series of unfavorable court decisions has forced the administration to change its formulation for the mandate, a centerpiece of the health-care law, several times in a row. According to the conservative Becket Fund, which serves as legal counsel in a number of lawsuits against the mandate including Ave Maria’s, that’s the eighth revision to the mandate so far.

The Supreme Court itself ruled this past summer the mandate itself violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in the case of closely held companies. Shortly after, the Court granted an injunction to Wheaton College, a Christian institution, which is battling the mandate’s exemption.

The mandate requires employers to provide 20 types of contraception at no cost to employees. After outcry against that strict requirement, the administration created an exemption for some religious non-profits that forced them to notify their insurance company third-party administrator of their objection — and then the insurer would be forced to cover the cost of the free contraception.

The Supreme Court’s injunction in Wheaton’s case shook the administration into fearing that even their exemption could be struck down on the grounds of religious freedom. So they came up with another formulation with yet another bureaucratic layer — instead of notifying insurers, now employers have to notify HHS that they object to providing the 20 types of contraception and HHS will be the ones to tell insurers that they have to pay up.

Ave Maria won’t have to provide birth control coverage or notify a third-party administrator and won’t be fined until an appeal in a similar lawsuit, from Christian television network EWTN, concludes.

“After dozens of court rulings, the government still doesn’t seem to get that it can’t force faith institutions to violate their beliefs,” Eric Baxter, senior counsel for the Becket Fund, said in a statement. “Fortunately, the courts continue to see through the government’s attempts to disguise the mandate’s religious coercion. We congratulate Ave Maria for its courage, even under the threat of crippling fines.”

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