From CNS news site:
(CNSNews.com) - The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is arguing in a new lawsuit that the Obama administration is engaged in a “conscious political strategy to marginalize and delegitimize” Catholic “religious views on contraception by holding them up for ridicule on the national stage.”
At issue in the lawsuit is whether the administration can force the archdiocese to secure a third-party administrator for its self-insurance plan who will provide sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs at no cost to church employees at some of the archdiocese’s separately incorporated subunits.
These subunits include a number of Catholic schools and charities, including Archbishop Carroll High School and Catholic Charities of Washington.
the administration insisted that these religious institutions were not "religious employers" so they could be ordered around.
Ho hum. what else is new? Just some confusion in the language of the law, nes pas?
But today, Instapundit links to a NReview article that notes that this was not an accident:
more HERE...an article about the suit by the Little Sisters of the Poor refusing to cooperate with the administration's mandates.
SHOCKER: Internal Obama Administration Emails Reveal Deliberate Targeting of Catholics with Contraceptive Mandate. “Administration health policy officials were downright obsessed with figuring out which Catholic institutions would fit within the section 6033-based exemption. As early as October 2011, the White House was trying to figure out how to structure the exemption so that Catholic universities would be forced to provide student contraceptives in student health plans. In July 2012, emails show officials trying to make sure that the contraceptive mandate would treat the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops – the spiritual leaders of Roman Catholic entities in the United States – differently from the colleges, charities, and other groups that they lead. The documents were originally discovered during congressional inquiries into the sharing of tax information between the IRS and the White House.”
First amendment? What first amendment?
Silly me.
I guess we need to ignore the first amendment...
But didn't Obama take an oath to defend the constitution?
ah, but the bishops still back him on immigration and gun control so don't expect them to make a fuss.
But the Little Sisters might have more guts: They actually recognized that the usual idiots took over a lot of the US orders and the nun's "leadership" group back in 1980's, years before the Vatican noticed. And unlike the Vatican, they took on the PCNew age sisters by leaving that group and starting an organization for nuns who are still Catholic.
yet this has implications much larger than the culture wars.
Reread that last part: it is a shocker too:
Heh. Some of us are old enough to remember Nixon, who had an enemy list, and tried to get the IRS to harass his political enemies.
The documents were originally discovered during congressional inquiries into the sharing of tax information between the IRS and the White House.(italics mine).
In the early 1970s, when embattled President Richard Nixon sought to use the Internal Revenue Service as a weapon to investigate his enemies, the administration turned to Walters, a Hartsville , S.C., native and head of the tax agency, to do the dirty work.
Walters, now 93, said he refused.
The IRS controversy currently dogging President Barack Obama has raised new allegations that the agency has been engaged in political meddling and bias. Obama has denounced as "outrageous" the targeting of conservative political groups by the IRS.
Walters walks with a cane now and is soft-spoken. But the recent IRS developments prompted him to sit down for an interview and resume his personal quest, not for vindication, but to validate his rejection of Nixon's tactics while he was commissioner of Internal Revenue.
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