Two Christian universities win suit against Obama abortion mandate

By Dan Calabrese —— Bio and Archives June 18, 2018

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This happened last week, although it flew largely under the news radar. And it’s excellent news. With the end of the Obama Administration is also coming the end of some clearly unconstitutional mandates Obama issued – often in clear and direct assaults against religious liberty.

Under an Obama-era mandate, health care providers were required to provide access to abortion services, even if they were Christian organizations who had moral objections to abortion. Obama didn’t care. He made the rules and you would make those abortions happen. The federal courts said otherwise:

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled in favor of two Christian colleges suing the government to avoid paying for abortion-related healthcare under a controversial Obama-era mandate. After the U.S. Justice Department dropped its opposition to the lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Mark W. Bennett in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, ruled that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) no longer could enforce the mandate against Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids and Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. The mandate, also known as the “abortion-pill mandate,” was part of former President Barack Obama’s major healthcare reforms. It required that all health insurance providers – including universities and employers – supply access to abortions, birth control, family planning and similar resources, regardless of potential religious convictions against such medicine. If universities declined to do so, they faced steep fees.

You’ll notice a pattern where attacks on religious liberty are concerned. Much as we saw with the gay marriage wedding cake controversy – which also resulted in a judicial win for religious liberty – the attack involved the government trying to force Christians to be a party to something that violates their faith. It’s not enough to merely not stand in the way. You must assist in the activity you consider immoral, or you must be an active participant in celebrating it. You cannot say no. You cannot just sit it out and decline to participate. You must provide for the abortion, bake the cake, take the pictures, arrange the bouquets . . . and if you want to decline and have someone else do it, you will be the target of legal action. So far the court rulings, at least the few we’ve gotten, have consistently called this line of attack illegal. You can’t force someone to do something that violates their conscience or their moral code. And trying to is especially egregious in a society that offers plenty of bakers and plenty of abortionists. There’s no reason you have to force the Christian baker to be the one to bake your cake. There’s no reason you have to force the Christian university to be the one to foot the bill for your abortion. Plenty of others are willing to do so. Unless the whole point here is not to provide access to these services, but to create a pretext by which to treat the practice of Christianity as, for all intents and purposes, against the law. And that is exactly what the Obama Administration consistently tried to do. It’s astonishing to me that anyone still believes his claim to be a Christian, but people see what they want to see.