Deciding Who Gets Religious Freedom:
The Latest HHS "Accommodation"
Matt Franck argues that in the latest proposed version of the HHS mandate, government decides who gets religious freedom and how much, even though all employers deserve religious freedom to live committedly to their beliefs.
In the latest proposed version of the HHS mandate, the government presumes to say which employers get religious freedom and how much they get, but all religious employers are obligated to live out their beliefs and should have the freedom to do so.
After nearly a year, the Obama administration released, on February 1, its latest version of a "compromise" with the employers who object, on religious grounds, to the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that their health plans cover no-cost access to sterilization services and contraceptives, including those that can act as abortifacients, destroying the early-stage embryo.
As many observers have already remarked, there is nothing substantively new in the administration's proposal, which only formalizes and fills in details of a proposal it first floated last March, and continues to be based on the same dubious science.
Now facing more than forty lawsuits initiated by colleges, charities, and other religious nonprofits, as well as by for-profit companies whose owners have religiously informed moral objections, the Obama administration may hope that its latest gambit will persuade some credulous judges to toss some of the litigants' cases.
But in truth, it has only revealed its own blinkered and tyrannical understanding of religious freedom, which it would sacrifice to a goal of "gender equality" that is at best only tenuously related to its free-contraception-for-all policy. And, if the judges attend closely to its arguments, it may even have severely weakened its case.
The Mandate's Three Categories of Employer
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