The absolutism of Obamacare and government control over your life

ObamaCare's Mandate To Shut Down Little Sisters Of The Poor

ObamaCare: A group of nuns dedicated to caring for the elderly poor is suing to prevent an uncaring administration from shutting down their compassionate order over their refusal to obey the contraception mandate.

There is no clearer or sadder example of the Obama administration's war on the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty than the demand by the Department of Health and Human Services to violate their religious consciences or pay heavy fines.

HHS has ruled that if the Sisters don't offer insurance policies to their employees that include free coverage for sterilization procedures, artificial contraceptives and abortifacients, these vowed-to-poverty women will have to pay about $1 million in IRS fines, effectively making their work nearly impossible.

The Little Sisters of the Poor are a global Roman Catholic congregation of women, founded in 1839 by St. Jeanne Jugan. They operate homes in 31 countries, where they provide loving care for more than 13,000 needy elderly persons. Thirty homes are in the U.S.

Last Tuesday, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Little Sisters of the Poor. It questions the HHS ruling that, while houses of worship are exempt from the contraception mandate, the Little Sisters of the Poor are merely a social service organization that serves and hires non-Catholics, so it does not qualify for an exemption.

"The Little Sisters are driven by their religious faith to do what they do in terms of taking care of the elderly poor," said Mark Rienzi, senior counsel for the Becket Fund. "The government should not be telling them they have to violate that faith to keep serving the poor."

That objection has been raised by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, which argues that that religious institutions aren't merely defined by church buildings open on Sunday but by the work they do and that the government needs to ensure the First Amendment isn't gutted.

"We are not exempt from the (ObamaCare) mandate because we neither serve nor employ a predominantly Catholic population," Sister Constance Carolyn Veit, the Little Sisters' communications director, told the Daily Caller. "We hire employees and serve/house the elderly regardless of race and religion, so that makes us ineligible for the exemption being granted churches."

"Like all of the Little Sisters, I have vowed to God and the Roman Catholic Church that I will treat all life as valuable, and I have dedicated my life to that work," said Sister Loraine Marie, superior for one of the three U.S. provinces in the congregation. "We cannot violate our vows by participating in the government's program to provide access to abortion-inducing drugs."

So the Department of Health and Human Services wants to shut down a group of nuns who provide health and human services to the elderly poor.

Worse yet, the government seems to be violating the liberals' beloved separation of church and state by defining what a church is and what it is not.

This is not an unintended consequence of ObamaCare. The destruction of non-government social service networks is necessary to complete our "fundamental transformation" from liberty to socialism.

In President Obama's transformed America there can be no credible noncoercive alternatives to government care for the poor.

"Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the constitution of the former Soviet Union," Cardinal George wrote in a column in the Catholic New World. "You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship — no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. We fought a long Cold War to defeat that vision of society."

Or so we thought.