Obama Administration to Supremes: Force Catholics to provide contraception

Per Fox News, the White House is not taking the surprising order the other day from Sonia Sotomayer lying down. Everybody in, nobody out! That's how it works when you socialize anything, you know. Central planning geniuses will tell you all day long that their designs are infallible as long as you don't let people opt out of what the central planners think they should be doing.

Religious freedom? Swat that away like a gnat. We've got a country to control here!

But the Justice Department, responding just before the Friday morning deadline, reiterated its argument that the group has no foundation for its case. The administration says religious nonprofit groups such of this one can certify that they don't want to provide contraceptive coverage. In that case, it would be up to a third-party administrator to decide whether to provide it. The DOJ filing noted that the administrator in this case "says it will not provide contraceptive coverage."

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"Applicants have no legal basis to challenge the self certification requirement or to complain that it involves them in the process of providing contraceptive coverage," the administration claimed. The Catholic group, though, has argued that even signing the certification form would violate the nuns' beliefs. A lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the group, blasted the administration over the filing. "The government demands that the Little Sisters of the Poor sign a permission slip for abortion drugs and contraceptives, or pay of millions in fines. The Sisters believe that doing that violates their faith, and that they shouldn't be forced to divert funds from the poor elderly and dying people they've devoted their lives to serve," senior counsel Mark Rienzi said in a statement.

The DOJ's argument is a crock. It's a classic shell game of changing how fungible cash flows to try to pretend something is not the way it is. The White House's so-called "accommodation" on this issue is that religious organizations who object to paying for contraception can sign something opting out of paying for the coverage, thus leaving it up to insurers whether to fund it out of their own pockets. Now anyone knows that the organization's premiums reflect the insurer's cost in covering the policy, plain and simple. There is no such thing as the insurer just paying for the contraceptives out of its own funds. It can be made to look that way, but the provision of this service is going to be reflected in the employer's costs. Plus, under this arrangement, people are getting free contraceptives by virtue of the fact that they work for an organization that expressly does not want to provide them. Any way you look at it, you are forcing these Catholic organizations to be participants in the provision of something that cuts deeply against their beliefs. Yet the Obama Administration demands that the Supreme Court force them to accept this, because any exception to the government's commands for any reason is unacceptable. This is nothing more than the federal government attempting to assert its own unassailable authority over all things, the Constitution be damned. Well, if they keep running roughshod over people's faith like this, someone's going to end up damned.