Administration pushes HHS lawsuits beyond election

Excerpted from "Wheaton HHS lawsuit dismissed," World magazine, July 12, 2012-- A last minute policy change absolving a Christian college from fines has enabled the federal government to avoid another legal challenge to its mandate for contraception coverage. On Friday, a federal judge in Washington D.C. dismissed a suit brought by Wheaton College against the government. The judge ruled the evangelical school in Illinois no longer had grounds to challenge the requirement that it cover contraceptive and abortifacient drugs under student and faculty health insurance policies.

As part of the 2010 healthcare reforms, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced last year that all employers would be required to cover contraceptive and abortifacient drugs. The rules offered an exemption to churches but not other religious employers, including schools and social service agencies. The mandate caused an uproar among Catholic and evangelical Protestant institutions, which vowed to fight the new rules. In an effort to delay the confrontation, the government offered religious employers a one-year reprieve, giving them until August 2013 to comply.

But Wheaton could not take advantage of the yearlong "safe harbor" because it had unknowingly offered coverage for abortifacient drugs Ella and Plan B, commonly referred to as "morning after" pills, under previous insurance policies. Without the reprieve, Wheaton faced thousands of dollars in fines every day. But with the latest policy change, the government succeeded in postponing Wheaton's suit for at least a year.
"The government has now re-written the 'safe harbor' guidelines three times in seven months, and is evidently in no hurry to defend the HHS mandate in open court," said Kyle Duncan, general counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents Wheaton. "By moving the goalposts yet again, the government managed to get Wheaton's lawsuit dismissed on purely technical grounds. This leaves unresolved the question of religious liberty at the heart of the lawsuit."

CMDA CEO David Stevens, MD, MA (Ethics): "Trampling on right of conscience and religious liberty does not play well in the news in an election year, so I’m not surprised that the government kicked the ball down the field. Unfortunately, there has been no reversal in the government's core belief that religion is a private matter to be relegated behind the walls of churches, synagogues and mosques. The administration's position in this mandate and in other policies and court cases betray an ideology that would leave religion no place in the public square. History reminds us what happens when an individual's responsibility to the State is made to trump responsibility to God.

"It is critical to understand that the contraceptive mandate is not the big issue. The greatest danger is that if the new, exceedingly narrow definition of who qualifies as 'religious enough' to conscientiously object, enshrined for the first time in this regulation, is not completely excised it will metastasize throughout all levels of government. We will then have completely lost our 'freedom of religion' and replaced this most basic of all rights with merely an anemic 'freedom to worship.' That will have a greater impact than when the courts radically redefined the meaning of the Establishment Clause to an absolute 'separation of church and state' and began to push religion out of virtually every publicly funded institution and arena.

"We dare not let this new definition stand. Our forefathers fought and died to give us our religious freedom. Like them, we must summon our boldness and courage to resist this tyranny, lest future generations consider us at best foolish and at worst cowards."

Resources
Visit CMA's Freedom2Care website, which provides daily news updates, legislative resources, background documents on conscience rights and religious freedom and action items including petitions to government officials.

CMDA Ethics Statment: Right of Conscience
Right of Conscience Resource Page