Obama Administration: We Can and Will Force Christians to Act Against Their Faith
David and Barbara Green of Hobby Lobby
31 December 2012: The following is an article from CNSNews.Com by Terence P. Jeffrey published on 29 December 2012. It is posted to Eschatology Today as a public service warning on how the Obama Administration's judges and lawyers are currently engaged in the persecution of Christians via legal means in order to circumvent and usurp matters of our faith. What you do with this information is up to you. Any one or more of us could be next in line for similar persecution. In the opinion of this blog this is how a tyrannical government operates.
(CNSNews.com) - In a legal argument formally presented in federal
court in the case of Hobby Lobby v. Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama
administration is claiming that the First Amendment—which expressly
denies the government the authority to prohibit the “free exercise” of
religion—nonetheless allows it to force Christians to directly violate
their religious beliefs even on a matter that involves the life and
death of innocent human beings.
Because federal judges—including Supreme Court Justice Sonia
Sotomayor—have refused to grant an injunction protecting the owners of
Hobby Lobby from being forced to act against their Christian faith,
those owners will be subject to federal fines of up to $1.3 million per
day starting Tuesday for refusing to include abortion-inducing drugs in
their employee health plan.
The Obama administration is making a two-fold argument for why it can
force Christians to act against their faith in complying with the
regulation it has issued under the Obamacare law that requires virtually
all health care plans to cover, without co-pay, sterilizations,
contraceptives, and abortion-inducing drugs.
The first argument the administration makes against the owners of
Hobby Lobby is that Americans lose their First Amendment right to freely
exercise their religion when they form a corporation and engage in
commerce. A person’s Christianity, the administration argues, cannot be
carried out through activities he engages in through an incorporated
business.
“Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer, and a secular entity
by definition does not exercise religion,” said Acting Assistant
Attorney General Stuart Delery in a filing submitted in the U.S.
District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma.
“Because Hobby Lobby is a secular employer, it is not entitled to the
protections of the Free Exercise Clause or RFRA [the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act],” Delery told the court on behalf of the
administration. “This is because, although the First Amendment freedoms
of speech and association are ‘right[s] enjoyed by religious and secular
groups alike,’ the Free Exercise Clause ‘gives special solicitude to
the rights of religious organizations.’”
In keeping with Delery’s argument, the Washington Post, as a
corporation, can use its First Amendment-protected freedom of speech to
write editorials in support of the Obama administration imposing its
contraception mandate on businesses like Hobby Lobby. But the members of
the family that created and owns Hobby Lobby, because they formed Hobby
Lobby as a corporation, have no First Amendment freedom of religion
that protects them from being forced by the government to act against
their religious beliefs in providing abortion-inducing drugs.
The second argument the administration makes to justify forcing
Christians to act against their faith is more sweeping. Here the
administration argues it can force a person to act against his religion
so long as the coercion is done under the authority of a law that is
neutral and generally applicable—in other words, as long as the law was
not written specifically to persecute Christians as Christians, the
government can use that law to persecute Christians.
Hobby Lobby is a family business. David Green created it in his
garage in Oklahoma City in 1972. He and his wife, Barbara, and their
three children—Steve, Mart and Darsee Green Lett-- have grown the
business to where it now operates 500 stores in 41 states. David Green
is Hobby Lobby’s CEO; Steve Green is its president; Mart Green is vice
CEO; and Darsee Lett is vice president. Mart Green is also CEO of the
privately owned Mardel chain of Christian bookstores, which operates 35
stores in 7 states. Through Hobby Lobby, the Greens have created more
than 13,000 jobs. Mardel has created 372 jobs.
The Greens, who are Evangelical Christians, do not suspend their
religious beliefs while running their businesses. Instead, they strive
to run them fully in accordance with their Christian beliefs. They are
unanimous in stating that they have always “sought to run Hobby Lobby in
harmony with God’s laws and in a manner which brings glory to God.”
They do not have two sets of morals—one for when they are at church or
at home and another for when they are working on their businesses. They
have only one set of morals—that they strive to follow at work or any
other activity. For example, they close their business on Sundays, so
their employees can spend that day with their families, and they pay
their full-time workers a minimum hourly wage of $13, which is far
exceeds the federal minimum wage.
They also provide their employees with a generous self-insured health
care plan, and they even operate an on-site, cost-free health clinic at
their corporate headquarters. But, guided by their Christian faith, the
Greens believe that human life begins at conception and that aborting
on unborn life is wrong. In keeping with this, they do not cover in
their employee health plan abortions, abortion-inducing drugs or IUDs
that prevent implantation of an embryo.
Unlike Catholics, the Greens do not believe that contraception and sterilization are morally wrong.
In September, the Greens, Hobby Lobby and Mardel bookstores sued
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Labor Secretary
Hilda Solis, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the departments of
Health Human Service, Labor and Treasury. Their complaint said that the
Obamacare contraception mandate violates their First Amendment right to
the free exercise of religion because supporting abortion or counseling
for abortion is contrary to their religious faith.
As the mandate now stands, the Greens must begin complying with it on
Jan. 1. On Nov. 11, U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton refused to grant a
preliminary injunction to stop the mandate from being enforced on the
Greens while the court decided their case on its merits. In his ruling
on the injunction, Judge Heaton determined that the Greens were not
likely to establish they had a right to “free exercise” of religion
while operating Hobby Lobby.
‘[T]he court concludes plaintiffs have not established a likelihood
of success as to their constitutional claims,” said Judge Heaton. “The
corporations lack free exercise rights subject to being violated and, as
the challenged statutes/regulations are neutral and of general
applicability as contemplated by the constitutional standard, plaintiffs
are unlikely to successfully establish a constitutional violation in
any event.”
The Greens appealed their request for an injunction to the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. A panel of two appeals court judges
refused their plea. They then appealed to Supreme Court Justice Sonia
Sotomayor, who sits over that circuit, and she declined to reverse the
lower courts and issue an injunction.
When Sotomayor ruled against a preliminary injunction on Thursday, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty,
which is representing the Greens, issued a statement indicating that
the Greens would not start complying with the mandate on Tuesday and
that they would continue to pursue their case in federal court.
“Hobby Lobby will continue their appeal before the Tenth Circuit,”
said Becket Fund General Counsel Kyle Duncan. “The Supreme Court merely
decided not to get involved in the case at this time. It left open the
possibility of review after their appeal is completed in the Tenth
Circuit. The company will continue to provide health insurance to all
qualified employees. To remain true to their faith, it is not their
intention, as a company, to pay for abortion-inducing drugs.”
As the nation approaches the much publicized fiscal cliff, it also
approaches a moral cliff: Will the Obama administration compel
Christians to act against their faith? As of now, the answer seems
plain: Starting Tuesday, it will.
