Posts Tagged ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’

The War on the Little Sisters of the Poor

Thursday, April 14th, 2016

The Little Sisters of the Poor case, which will decide whether the Obama Administration can force Catholic nuns to pay for abortions by fiat, is before the Supreme Court.

Some interesting developments:

The government’s position in Zubik v. Burwell, the contraceptive mandate case, just got weirder. It is increasingly difficult to understand why the government has been litigating so long and so hard to force the Little Sisters and other religious organizations to perform acts they regard as contrary to their faith, when it now admits (however grudgingly) that it all was unnecessary.

Of course, this ignores the possibility that the entire point of ObamaCare (and the administration’s specific interpretation of same) was to force Catholics and evangelicals to pay for abortion against their will. As Yuval Levin notes: “It is a culture war of choice on the part of the Obama White House.” That’s the reason this administration is willing to violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in order to punish the The Little Sisters of the Poor. As Instapundit noted: “They hate those groups and wanted to punish them.”

Every knee must bend.

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Posted in Democrats, ObamaCare | 1 Comment »

The Rank Dishonesty of Liberal Reactions to the Hobby Lobby Decision

Tuesday, July 1st, 2014

The liberal outrage machine was working overtime yesterday to see who could issue the most hysterical denunciation of the Hobby Lobby decision. Without actually, you know, addressing the language of the decision.

First an foremost are the idiots who scream that the Supreme Court is “banning contraception.”

In fact, the decision doesn’t “ban” any form of birth control, it merely invalidates the Obama Administration mandate to provide abortifacients against their own religious beliefs. Or, to put it another way:

Second, it is amazing how few (if any) liberals mention how closely tied the decision is to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby was a statutory decision based on that act, not a First Amendment case.

[Facepalm]

Yeah, the Hobby Lobby ruling doesn’t involve the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, except for the tiny detail of basing the entire decision on the language of the act. Which it announces in the very first paragraph of the decision:

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) prohibits the “Government [from] substantially burden[ing] a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability” unless the Government “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.”

Finally, there’s the amazing ignorance of comparing not forcing a company to buy four specific types of birth control for their employees to a legal regime where a woman can be stoned to death for the crime of being raped:

The stupid. It burns.

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Posted in Democrats, Supreme Court | 2 Comments »