Catholics sue U.S. gov't over contraception mandate

IRONDALE, AL. (WANE) – The EWTN Global Catholic Network announced it filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and others in an effort to stop the contraception mandate and ask the court declare the mandate as unconstitutional.

The EWTN said it is the first Catholic organization to file suit against HHS, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other government agencies since the final rules were published by the Obama administration on January 20, 2011.

The suit was filed on behalf of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

“We had no other option but to take this to the courts,” said EWTN President and
CEO Michael P. Warsaw. “Under the HHS mandate, EWTN is being forced by the government to make a choice: either we provide employees coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs and violate our conscience or offer our employees and their families no health insurance coverage at all. Neither of those choices is acceptable.”

“We are taking this action to defend not only ourselves but also to protect other institutions – Catholic and non-Catholic, religious and secular – from having this mandate imposed upon them,” Warsaw continued. “The government is forcing EWTN, first, to inform its employees about how to get contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs, a concept known as forced speech. To make the matter worse, the government then will force EWTN to use its donors’ funds to pay for these same morally objectionable procedures or to pay for the huge fines it will levy against us if we fail to provide health care insurance. There is no question that this mandate violates our First Amendment rights. This is a moment when EWTN, as a Catholic organization, has to step up and say that enough is enough. Our hope is that our lawsuit does just that.”

Kyle Duncan, a former Louisiana Solicitor General and General Counsel of the Becket Fund, said that without a change in the rules, EWTN could be forced to pay more than $600,000 for not underwriting these services.

“When the government recently mandated that all private group health plans cover certain abortion drugs (namely, Plan B and ella), as well as related education and counseling, [our clients] knew that they could not obey both the government’s mandate and their own religious convictions,” said Mark Rienzi, who focuses his practice at the Becket Fund on violations of the Fourteenth Amendment, free speech, and the free exercise of religion.