The Justice Department will defend the HHS contraceptive mandate against legal challenges like those filed by The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
But that’s to be expected. But on top of that, according to CNS News, Attorney General Eric Holder told a House subcommittee Tuesday, “I don’t think the rule that HHS promulgated was one that ran counter to the religious prohibitions that are contained in the First Amendment.”
I even spoke to Mark Rienzi, an attorney with The Becket Fund, and he said that the Obama administration’s response to the Belmont Abbey College lawsuit against the HHS mandate wasn’t a constitutional defense of the mandate. Essentially, it was a promise to change it later to make it constitutional.
It was sort of a plea to the court to allow this mandate to run afoul the Constitution as long as the administration promised that sometime in the future they would make it more constitutional.
So even the administration hasn’t argued for the legality of the mandate but Holder is out there as the head of Justice, saying something that the administration and its defenders don’t even say.
And you know why. It’s because they don’t give a hoot about the Constitution. They think that the government should be able to do whatever they darn well want to do. And if they want to force Catholics to pay for things that the Church finds sinful and evil, then they’re going to do it. They don’t care about some 2,000 year old Church and they don’t care about some 200 year old document. Nobody should even try to limit their power. They’re alive now. And they have the power. And they know best.
