ObamaCare Litigation and the Christian’s Conscience
By Melancton Smith • Monday January 7, 2013 7:08 AM PDT • 14 Comments
This year, litigation proceeds about the ObamaCare requirement dealing with health insurance and abortion drugs. The mandate requires employers to provide health insurance coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization. Employers are compelled to provide these in spite of religious beliefs about abortion. Failure to comply results in fines of $100 per employee per day. The companies challenging the mandate are relying, among other things, on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which provides that a “religiously neutral law” such as ObamaCare can improperly burden and harm religion to such a degree that a plaintiff must be exempt from its application. Here are the relevant statutory provisions:
a) In general
Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, except as provided in subsection (b) of this section.
(b) Exception
Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person—(1)is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and(2)is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.
Domino’s Farm Corporation recently won a victory in federal district court when a judge granted an injunction. This means that the fines are not accruing for the company while it is involved in the litigation. The Domino’s Farm complaint can be found here.
However, Hobby Lobby, which has a similar suit, was denied an injunction. Even in the face of millions in fines per day, Hobby Lobby is proceeding with litigation and sticking to its guns on the mandate. Hobby Lobby will continue to provide health insurance for employees, but it refuses to pay for the morning-after pill and the week-after pill. Hobby Lobby’s formal complaint can be found here. As for the mandate, Hobby Lobby’s CEO states:
These abortion-causing drugs go against our faith, and our family is now being forced to choose between following the laws of the land that we love or maintaining the religious beliefs that have made our business successful and have supported our family and thousands of our employees and their families. We simply cannot abandon our religious beliefs to comply with this mandate. … By being required to make a choice between sacrificing our faith or paying millions of dollars in fines, we essentially must choose which poison pill to swallow.
This could be some of the most important litigation of 2013. Failure to win in the courts will cause these businesses to compromise values or close their doors and put thousands of Americans out of work. We’ll pay close attention to the litigation as it progresses.
Tags: Christianity, Civil Liberties, Constitution, Culture, Healthcare, Integrity, Law, Morality, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics, Regulation, Religion, Women 
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful & tyrannical – Thomas Jefferson.
Chuck Marchese | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
Religious organizations have tax-free status and are creating a great burden on everyone who doesn’t believe their myths. Meanwhile they continue to try and force their narrow beliefs, such as creationism, upon science education.
Dallas Weaver | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
You know the first scientists were extremely faithful to God right? All of the ground work was laid down by God-fearing men, denying the founding principles, would render your whole belief system incorrect: A house cannot stand without a foundation. Please leave and spout off your ignorance somewhere else.
N. Haywood | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
...and what great burden are they putting on you Dallas? Creationism is a narrow belief? It is held by as many scientists as the number of scientists who believe the “science” that your ancestors ate bananas and hung around in trees. And, just in case you have not realized it yet, evolution is not science, it is theory. These religious organizations spend more money on helping needy people than they receive from their tax-free status. So quit proving that some of you people really did evolve from monkeys.
Tom Heinrich | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
What does that have to do this? Hobby Lobby is a private profitable business – duh!
Shiloh | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
Religious organizations provide many services for hurting and/or needy people at no charge to the people receiving the service, or the public at large, while being non-profit. At the same time doing it much more efficiently than the government could. Their tax-exempt status hurts you in no way. Your comment is no less an effort to try to force your narrow beliefs on them, than their statements of faith are. I am a scientist and realize that without the Christian worldview science has no basis. The Christian worldview provides the foundation for reason, inductive or deductive.
Anthony Dunn | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
Mr. Weaver–While you are obviously either an ignorant, uninformed, communist, atheist, or any other unstable mental persona, you ignore the massive charity that the church bestows upon those who actually do create, maintain, and enlarge the great burden on citizens of all beliefs.
mike bystrek | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
Why are people so afraid of having affordable health care?
Eric | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
Read the Bible where Jesus said to pay to Ceasar what is Ceasars whether it is right or wrong! It is a law written for the betterment of a society not a religion!
Eric | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
Dallas. You cannot have actually read any of C.S Lewis or you would not say that.
jane | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
Eric, Your assumption that government-dominated healthcare will produce lower costs has no evidence. Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming that Obamacare is and will result in far higher healthcare costs, less access and lower quality, and that government’s existing pervasive control of healthcare is the cause of the current problems. Why? The answer is that socialism always results in bureaucratic incompetence, waste, and corruption, while people being free to make their own choices produces the opposite. Please see the following book:
Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, by John C.. Goodman
As for your reference to Jesus’s comment in the synoptic gospels, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” you have entirely missed the point. Jesus taught that there is nothing that Caesar has sovereignty over that God is not sovereign of. The specific instance of the comment was Jesus describing the nature of taxation and Roman government coinage (denarius) engraved with Tiberius’s image claiming to be god (“Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the Divine Augustus”). Here are quotes on the real meaning here:
David J. Theroux | Jan 7, 2013 | Reply
You are completely wrong and you either know it or are too lazy to learn the truth.
Amy Craig | Jan 9, 2013 | Reply
Dallas Weaver, And I suppose that pressing your evolution on people who don’t believe it is acceptable? Or even the fact that we (religious individuals) must adhere to your atheism because you don’t consider it a religion? Well news flash: atheism is still a religious belief whether you think so or not. I also suppose that abortion is acceptable? Well let me pose a question to you? What is the current statistic for abortion rates? I bet if you take that statistic and compare it to those slaughtered during the Holocaust, abortions statistics will severally outweigh the Holocaust. So what makes us any better then the Nazi regime? The fact that we have other freedoms? oh wait... That can’t be the case because you’ve taken our religious beliefs (stated in article above), our guns ( current legislation on gun control), our right to live (again stated above), our economy (the amount of our national debt), our money (taxes resulting from the fiscal cliff), our quality of life (the current unemployment rate and future unemployment rate if companies decide to close their doors rather than adhere to Obamacare), and our republic (current attempts to suppress our freedoms, ideals, and complete disregard for the Constitution shown by our President and his goons). So yes please tell me how we are any better than the Nazis and Communists. If you even have a legitimate, intelligent, educated, common sense answer to this your more than welcome to email me at little_shuey@yahoo.com.
Kyle | Jan 10, 2013 | Reply
So many errors in such a short comment. A fetus, though many try to deny it, meets the SCIENTIFIC definition of life as much as any born child (the only one it doesn’t meet is the ability to reproduce, and neither to born children until over a decade of life) – so since when was murder a betterment to society?
Secondly, when will people realize that government money is OUR money? The government produces nothing, sells nothing (except a piece of paper called a bond, that “binds” them to pay you back with interest at a later date, so technically they are buying a loan from you). If you make a company provide health care, guess what – they are going to raise the prices of their products/services to cover that cost. Same if you raise the minimal wage – or worse, they will lay people off because their work is not worth the new rate.
The only way the gov’t gets money is by taking from people – which they have a right to do. But so far they have shown much less capability to use it wisely than any business – no business in America is in as much debt as the American gov’t.
Eric S | Feb 28, 2013 | Reply