It’s a bad idea to make a habit — forgive the pun — of suing nuns. Definitely don’t sue nuns to force them to provide abortion coverage in their health insurance plans.
The Little Sisters of the Poor are an order of Catholic nuns who care for the poor, elderly, sick, and dying. They dedicate their lives to serving the most vulnerable people and expect nothing in return. So naturally, Democratic Party politicians have spent the past decade and a half trying to break the religious order, oblige its sisters to violate their consciences, and provide health insurance plans that cover abortion and contraception.
This shameful drama culminated in a 7-2 ruling at the Supreme Court in 2020. The court sided with the nuns and said a Trump administration rule that offered broad religious freedom protections from the contraceptive mandate in Obamacare had been properly enacted. Thus the government would not force the sisters to provide health insurance coverage for procedures and services that violate Catholic teaching.
Undeterred, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), who was then Pennsylvania’s attorney general, launched another lawsuit against the nuns, pursuing yet another legal theory to force the sisters to give way on contraception and abortion and invalidate the rule that the Trump administration put in place. On Wednesday, a district court judge in Pennsylvania ruled against the sisters, meaning the nuns must either add contraception and abortion to their insurance coverage or face millions of dollars in fines.
The ruling means the Little Sisters of the Poor will probably soon again find themselves in the Supreme Court, pleading for the simple right to serve the poor, elderly, and infirm without violating Church teaching. That this is even questioned is extraordinarily distasteful. That it has gone on so long is an unconscionable act of left-wing persecution.
The Left’s unrelenting legal crusade against the nuns is a public scandal. The Obamacare contraception mandate, with its insufficient conscience protections, was unnecessary. Providing coverage for contraceptives and abortion was hardly controversial for most employers.
The purpose of the mandate was to target religious employers who would object to it. The Left and Democrats wanted the fight. They hate religious liberty and anything else that gives people or organizations freedom to live and work as they will, rather than as the central government dictates. In other words, the legal case began expressly because the Obama administration wanted to force religious employers, including nuns, to provide services that violated their deepest beliefs and promises. Shapiro continued the case in Pennsylvania after the federal rule was amended, because he, like Obama, wanted to force nuns to associate themselves with contraception and abortion.
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This is nothing short of bigotry. Leaders of the Democratic Party who have sanctioned and pushed for this legal war are doing so with the goal of imposing secular values on religious organizations. The First Amendment of the Constitution does not simply provide for a state free of an established church, it also expressly protects the “free exercise” of religion.
This travesty of a ruling should be quickly overturned by the appellate court. But in the meantime, the public should ask its leaders why they care so much about forcing nuns to violate their consciences. Perhaps tellingly, Shapiro, now the governor of Pennsylvania with presidential ambitions, has not made a statement about the ruling in a case he initiated. Perhaps he would feel ashamed of it, as he should.