Unbelievable!

I found it unbelievable that an Attorney General would sue the Trump administration in the first place to keep the birth control mandate in place, forcing religious groups, including the Little Sisters of the Poor, to provide contraception and abortifacients to their employees.

Now, even more unbelievably, federal judge Wendy Beetlestone has agreed with Pennsylvania’s Attorney General Josh Shapiro, claiming that blocking the mandate would likely cause “serious and irreparable harm” to the state if it were upheld. So, she blocked Trump’s rules allowing exceptions to the mandate with a temporary injunction.

Serious and irreparable harm to the state? Who is Judge Beetlestone kidding? Contraception is readily and affordably available to the vast, vast majority of women. According to a video produced by the ACLU in support of the HHS mandate, as many as 120,000 women could be negatively impacted by Trump’s rollback of the mandate. 120,000 women! That represents about 0.000076% of all women in the United States. And, yet, Beetletone has the audacity to claim that providing an exception to the mandate for those with religious objections would cause “serious and irreparable harm” to the state of Pennsylvania. Apparently, in Shapiro and Beetlestone’s minds, the religious liberty of 100% of Americans must bow to the demands of 0.000076% of the female population in the U. S.

Let’s be clear. The HHS birth control mandate has never been about securing access to birth control for women. Women have access to birth control. The mandate is about the State suppressing the religious liberty of Americans. Barack Obama and the Democrats who put this mandate in place are Statists. That is, they believe that the State is and ought to be the primary institution in the lives of a country’s citizens, primary even over the family and certainly over the Church. The point of the mandate is to impose the primacy of the State over the Church. If the State can demand that Catholic nuns can be forced to pay for contraceptives and abortifacients, then the State can demand that Catholic hospitals be forced to pay for abortions, sterilizations, hormonal therapy for transgendered persons and sex-change operations. The point of the mandate has nothing to do with birth control. It has everything to do with imposing the will of the State on religious believers.

This matter needs to be settled once and for all, and settled in favor of the First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/365148-federal-judge-blocks-trump-repeal-of-obamacare-birth-control-mandate

Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.