Great News from the Beckett Fund folks!
Today, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. handed Wheaton College and Belmont Abbey College a major victory in their challenges to the HHS mandate. Last summer, two lower courts had dismissed the Colleges’ cases as premature. Today, the appellate court reinstated those cases, and ordered the Obama Administration to report back every 60 days—starting in mid-February—until the Administration makes good on its promise to issue a new rule that protects the Colleges’ religious freedom. The new rule must be issued by March 31, 2013.
“The D.C. Circuit has now made it clear that government promises and press conferences are not enough to protect religious freedom,” said Kyle Duncan, General Counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, who argued the case. “The court is not going to let the government slide by on non-binding promises to fix the problem down the road.”
This is great news for anyone who takes religious liberty seriously!
Of course, some people are still curious as to what the big deal is…
“Why is the HHS Mandate such a moral issue, anyway? What’s wrong with contraception”
Of course, the HHS mandate is wrong on so many levels. From a purely secular perspective, it’ll kill jobs and shut down hospitals, including hospitals that give out free care to the poor.
That said, even if you don’t see a problem with contraception, others do. Others with 2000 years of theology, moral philosophy, and tradition think so. (In fact, ALL of the western world, including every protestant reformer and all protestant denominations thought so until about 1933, when the Anglican church decided to permit it for SOME circumstances–a decision which papers like the Washington post lambasted as horribly misguided!) That is enough reason to resist.
But if you want to dig deeper in to the “why”, let me share some resources that may be instructive. I’ll use only the wittiest, funniest sources I know of:
1) Contraceptives violate natural law.
2) Chemical Contraceptives are sometimes-abortifacients (i.e., they can actively cause abortions)
3) Chemical Contraceptives can increase the abortion rate (not decrease it as some have claimed)
4) Of course, there are scriptural concerns, too, which make this fall back under the 1st amendment’s protection.
5) Which all comes down to the fact that the right to practice your faith uninfringed upon is, at least, a deeper and more fundamental right than “the right to contraceptives” (many of which are Class 1 Carcinogens.)
I’m not here to beat you over the head, or force you to adopt a position, but hopefully you can at least understand better the issue now.