Fix Health Care Policy

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has already filed two lawsuits challenging the Obamacare regulation that requires many religious employers to provide health insurance coverage for sterilization, contraception, and what many people believe are abortion-inducing drugs.

Those lawsuits are on behalf of Belmont Abbey College (a Benedictine Catholic college in North Carolina) and Colorado Christian University (a nondenominational Christian university in Colorado).

This morning, the Becket Fund sued the Obama Administration again, this time on behalf of Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the Catholic television network that was started nearly 30 years ago by a cloistered nun named Mother Angelica in her monastery garage.

According to its press release, the network objects to paying for—and refuses to pay for—“contraceptive services and for drugs that destroy human life”:

“The federal government cannot force people to violate their religion like this,” said Mark Rienzi, Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund and a constitutional law professor at the Catholic University of America. “Mother Angelica founded EWTN to spread the teachings of the Catholic Church—not to betray them.”

EWTN claims it is “the largest religious media network in the world” and transmits programming “24 hours a day to more than 148 million homes in 144 countries and territories.” If EWTN wasn’t already covering the Obama Administration’s “unprecedented” assault on religious freedom before, it seems likely that viewers will be provided ample coverage in the days to come.

Tags: contraceptive mandate, lawsuits, ObamaCare, religious liberty, unprecedented

As soon as President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Health Care for America Act of 2010 into law, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli filed suit against the federal government, arguing that the legislation is unconstitutional.

Cuccinelli highlights the individual mandate as particularly offensive to the Constitution, emphasizing that “at no time in our history has the government mandated its citizens buy a good or service.”

Some disagree with Cuccinelli, pointing to the Second Militia Act of 1792 as evidence that the individual mandate is not unprecedented and furthermore that the Founders would have supported the recent health care bill. This argument is analytically defective. The Second Militia Act of 1972 neither sanctions nor foreshadows the individual mandate in the recently passed health care legislation.

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Tags: Individual Mandate, ObamaCare, Second Militia Act, The Commerce Clause, unconstitutional, unprecedented, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli