-Colleges Fight Obama Contraceptives Mandate
by Dr. D ~ July 19th, 2012
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This week comes the news that two protestant Christian colleges are challenging the Obama administration HHS ‘Contraceptive Mandate’ in lawsuits. They join with a number of Catholic schools and organizations that have already filed against the administration.
First of all, the president of Louisiana College, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, announced that his school would go forward with a lawsuit against the ObamaCare mandate but also promised to defy the law regardless of how the court ruled in the case:
“If the government continues to say that we have to do this, we will not do it,” President Joe Aguillard told Fox News. “There’s going to be, in my opinion, a constitutional crisis. We’re not going to do it.”
The second college to bring a lawsuit over the mandate is the prominent evangelical institution- Wheaton College. Their lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by the Becket Fund. Wheaton College President Philip Graham Ryken, said the potential penalties coming from the mandate “would amount to $1.4 million in fines annually for faculty and staff alone.”
Response: Meanwhile, some of the media which tends to be rather supportive of President Obama charged that the actions were ‘politically motivated.’ The colleges on the other hand say they are going forth with their lawsuits now in order to avoid complying with the mandate for the Fall semester which is coming in September. For these two protestant institutions it is not only a matter of additional costs that the Obama mandate would require, but it is also a matter of religious freedom. *Top
