March for Life's court victory--and ours

The irony of a sweeping, expensive, and burdensome law like Obamacare is that a pro-life organization has to sue the federal government to avoid aiding and abetting the very thing it opposes.

March for Life holds a rally against abortion every January in Washington, D.C., on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. The non-profit group sued the U.S. government to stop enforcement of Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. Under the law, employers must provide health insurance coverage for sterilization and contraceptives, which includes drugs that might cause abortions.

Why would a pro-life organization, a high-profile one that holds an annual march to protect the unborn, cover drugs for employees that might kill the unborn? A federal court wondered the same thing. On Monday, a district judge granted March for Life’s request and permanently barred the government from enforcing the mandate against the group, “its health insurance issuer, and the insurance issuer(s) of employee plaintiffs.” The judge wrote that if the “purpose of the religious employer exemption is, as HHS [Health and Human Services] states, to respect the anti-abortifacient tenets of an employment relationship, then it makes no rational sense—indeed, no sense whatsoever to deny March for Life that same respect.”

Businesses and non-profit organizations have objected to the mandate on religious grounds. But March for Life is secular and opposed the mandate on ethical grounds. “There’s no reason the government should treat them negatively because their views on abortion are based on science instead of being based on religion,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Matt Bowen told the Associated Press.

Did the president and his people really think this through? Although the U.S. Supreme Court decided more than four decades ago that the U.S. Constitution contained a previously unknown right of privacy for women to kill their own unborn children, it is a highly controversial and immoral doctrine. Abortion has never been nor will ever be “healthcare.” It’s bad enough that we fund Planned Parenthood, knowing what it does with the babies it kills.

Bowen said organizations that oppose abortion “should not be forced into betraying the very values they were established to advance. … The government has no right to demand that organizations provide health insurance plan options that explicitly contradict their mission.”

Let’s take our victories where we can and pray for the election of lawmakers who will repeal sweeping, expensive, and burdensome laws that demand we violate our conscience and religious beliefs. Pro-life lawmakers should be working overtime to stop our tax dollars from going to Planned Parenthood. Our First Amendment religious freedom should be a top priority, especially now that the government has redefined marriage. Prepare yourselves for threesomes, foursomes, and fivesomes of either sex.

Prepare yourselves for more violence and rumors of violence. Violence against the unborn. Violence against innocent bystanders. Violence against the police. Spiritual deadness plagues this land, and America is under God’s wrath. Depravity has gone mainstream, and the stigma is long gone. But Christ said, “Surely I am coming quickly.” And we say, “Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!”