OPINION:
One of the most important human rights issues has reached the Supreme Court, which will decide whether the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Roman Catholic order, has the right to dispense charity according to its own code.
The High Court will hear oral arguments in Zubik v. Burwell, as the case is titled, on March 23. The case is about whether nuns who have dedicated their lives to caring for the elderly poor, and by extension other Catholic and Protestant faith-based ministries, must comply with the law which requires all public institutions to draw no distinctions on prescriptive drugs and devices. The nuns would be ordered to offer drugs that violate their religious beliefs on contraception and abortion. It’s about the bad faith of the Obama administration because these drugs would be made available through other health care exchanges.
The administration originally promised the Sisters and others similarly situated that they would be exempt, but under pressure from the abortion lobby reversed its decision. It requires that the Little Sisters change their health care plan to offer drugs that violate their beliefs and teachings. This is despite the fact that a third of all American workers employed by secular companies cannot get these drugs through employers because those employers were “grandfathered” and rendered exempt under Obamacare rules.
The Little Sisters of the Poor was born of the rural experience of Jeanne Jugan, a young French woman who grew up in a small town in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Young Jeanne, who would be declared a saint by her church, supported her family as a shepherdess and kitchen maid. She further tended the ill at a naval hospital. Her humility and love of the poor and the ailing became celebrated throughout France as a selfless expression of the Gospel of Christ.
Nearly two centuries later the Little Sisters of the Poor thrive as a charity that serves more than 13,000 elderly poor in 31 countries. Its first home opened in America in 1868, and now 30 such homes care for the elderly and dying. The Obama administration requires church-run ministries to supply all prescriptive drugs, and demands the Sisters sign over their health care plan or pay $30 million in fines imposed by the Internal Revenue Service.
The Supreme Court, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, ruled that the government cannot require family-owned businesses to provide abortion-inducing drugs and devices through their employee insurance plan if it violates the families’ religious beliefs. Later, the Supreme Court cited the Hobby Lobby decision as precedent to uphold prisoners’ religious rights. The High Court has since, on several occasions, granted temporary protection for ministries that, like the Little Sisters, face large fines.
But last year the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, acting as arbiter of religious doctrine, instructed the Little Sisters that tenets of their faith about complicity were wrong. The appeals court endorsed the U.S. government’s demand that the Sisters sign over their health plan in an order that “relieves [the Little Sisters] from complicity.” The Supreme Court has the opportunity now to teach the lower court a little fundamental constitutional law.
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