Brief filed Opposing Obamacare‘s
Contraception/Abortion Mandate
Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Kathleen Sebelius
The story is told of a grizzled Master Sargent who,
reflecting on his years of service, said: “When I joined up,
homosexuality was prohibited; now it’s tolerated; and I darn
sure am getting out before it’s mandatory.” So it is with
respect to homosexual and abortion rights. First, the goal
is said to be tolerance. Then, governmental approval and
support. Lastly, any pretense of tolerance disappears, and
the coercive force of government is used to eliminate any
vestige of opposition. The Obmacare contraception/abortion
mandate demonstrates that our nation is at the end of phase
two, moving into phase three.
On January 28, 2014,
our firm filed in the U.S. Supreme Court an amicus brief in
support of Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., a Mennonite
family-owned business located in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania. The company has been ordered by the Secretary
of Health and Human Services to purchase health insurance to
cover their employees that pays for contraceptive services,
including “the full-range of FDA-approved contraceptive
methods and patient education and counseling for women with
reproductive capacity.”
While Obamacare uses the
term contraceptive, that term has undergone a dramatic shift
in meaning over the past 50 years. In the array of what are
called “contraceptives” are true abortifacients — drugs and
devices that induce a miscarriage or an abortion, and the
death of an embryo.
Objecting on the ground that the
mandate forces them to buy insurance that permits and
facilitates abortion to which they object on religious
grounds, the Hahn family who own Conestoga, sought
injunctive relief in a federal district court, claiming that
the mandate violated their rights under the Religious
Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) and the First Amendment
guarantee of the free exercise of religion.
The
district court denied relief, and the court of appeals
affirmed. The Supreme Court granted the Hahn family’s
petition for review, and the case is pending with a decision
expected by the end of June, 2014.
In an introductory
Statement our brief reminds the Court that the contraceptive
mandate does not appear in the Affordable Care Act enacted
by Congress and signed by the President. The mandate was not
even developed by the Department of Heath and Human
Services, or any other agency responsible to he President.
Instead, it is the product of a Committee of 16 experts
appointed by the Institute of Medicine, a nongovernment
agency that is not accountable to the people or their
elected representatives.
In the opinion of this
Committee of experts, the contraceptive mandate is required
because a woman’s “well-being” consists of a life of
recreational sexual activity without risk of an unplanned
pregnancy, and it is this opinion that HHS has made into
law.
Our brief supports the Hahn family claim that
the mandate violates their rights under the free exercise
clause of the First Amendment to the United States
Constitution. Unlike the Hahn family brief which relies upon
court precedents supporting religious tolerance, our brief
rests upon the original First Amendment text that secures
freedom of religion. According to the cases that apply the
religious tolerance doctrine, a person’s conscience may be
overridden by laws that serve a compelling government
interest. Under the First Amendment freedom of religion a
person’s conscience cannot be violated no matter how
“compelling” the government’s interest may be.
The
original understanding of “religion,” as it appears in the
First Amendment, appeared earlier in the 1776
Virginia Declaration of Rights. Unlike the First Amendment
the Virginia Declaration expressly defines religion as a
duty owed to the Creator which is enforceable only by
reason, not by force. In a statute passed in 1785 by the
Virginia General Assembly, the preamble declared that it
would be a violation of the free exercise of religion if a
law compelled a person to promote an opinion with which he
disagreed. Our brief applies this principle to the
contraceptive services mandate which compels the Hahn family
business to promote a government program of education and
counseling encouraging women to use abortion-inducing
contraceptives to reduce the risk of “unwanted pregnancies.”
The Obamacare law is based upon an unproved
presumption that a woman’s “well-being” depends upon having
as wide an array of contraceptive methods, including
abortifacients, as is made available by the FDA, so that she
can be sexually active without risking an unplanned
pregnancy. The Hahn family, however, does not share the
Government’s materialistic view of womanhood, and that the
Government has no jurisdiction to define what it means to be
a healthy woman.
Finally our brief reminds the Court
that forbearance is a Christian virtue and that the
contraceptive services mandate prevents the Hahn family from
practicing that virtue by mandating complicity in what they
believe to be the sin of abortion in violation of the Hahn
family’s statement of faith in the sanctity of human life,
supporting that position with quotations from the Holy
Bible.
In summary our brief maintains that according
to the original meaning of the free exercise of religion,
the federal government is prohibited from enforce the
contraceptive mandate because it prohibits the Hahn family
from performing their duties to their Creator according to
the dictates of conscience.
This amicus brief was our
fourth amicus curiae brief filed thus far against Obamacare
in its various manifestations.
Our brief was
filed on behalf of Eberle Communications Group, Inc., D&D
Unlimited Inc., Joyce Meyer Ministries, Southwest Radio
Bible Ministry, Daniel Chapter One, U.S. Justice Foundation,
Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall, Institute on the
Constitution, Lincoln Institute for Research and Education,
Abraham Lincoln Foundation, Conservative Legal Defense and
Education Fund, and Policy Analysis Center.
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