Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) really doesn’t like it when people accuse him of suing nuns. The solution here is simple: He should stop fighting nuns in court.
The Little Sisters of the Poor, nine years after defeating the Obama administration in the Supreme Court over the contraception mandate, eight years after President Donald Trump issued an executive order codifying a religious and conscience exemption, are still in court over the mandate.
The reason: One activist liberal federal judge, and one Pennsylvania governor who tries to pose as a moderate Democrat.
On Monday, the Sisters appealed a federal court ruling against the Trump administration’s rule creating a religious and conscience exemption from President Barack Obama’s rule requiring nearly all employers, including orders of nuns, to arrange for their workers’ contraception and sterilization coverage.
Shapiro, along with the governor of New Jersey, is the opposing party in this case. Shapiro and the Democrats in Trenton could end this case if they wanted, and then nuns, Mennonite business owners, and religious minorities across America wouldn’t have to fight in court anymore for their conscience rights.
This would require Shapiro bucking some of his party’s most powerful special interests. But Shapiro wants to be president, he wants to win swing voters, and he wants to be seen as a moderate. The best way to moderate on social issues is to embrace religious toleration and the freedom of conscience. Instead, Shapiro is fighting in court to impose his morality on others.
Obamacare required employers to cover 100% of the cost of “women’s preventive health,” and Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services ruled that this included all forms of birth control (including those that can cause abortions) and sterilization.
Why the federal government started treating pregnancy as a disease and why your employer should be your source for birth control are two questions Obama never answered.
Catholic teaching prohibits artificial contraception, and many other Christians join Catholics in opposing abortifacients and sterilization. Obama granted a very narrow conscience objection to the mandate, which mostly applied to actual churches. The mandate with such narrow exemptions violated federal law (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act), the Supreme Court ruled in Hobby Lobby.
When Donald Trump came into office, he codified and expanded the conscience objections to minimize the chances that, say, nuns would be forced to arrange for Plan B coverage for their employees.
Shapiro, then Pennsylvania’s attorney general, sued to overturn Trump’s conscience clause. That is, he wants to force the tiny share of employers with religious objections into being contraceptive and abortion pill providers.
In 2020, Shapiro lost to the Sisters in the Supreme Court in a 7-2 ruling. Liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan agreed with the nuns and disagreed with Shapiro.
Yet, he hasn’t given up. He’s suing again to kill the conscience protections.
Shapiro, unlike some Democrats, wants to appeal across party lines and ideological gulfs. He should be a centrist in the culture wars. This doesn’t require him to change his views on gay marriage, abortion, birth control, or gender. It just requires him to stop imposing them on people who object.
Shapiro could lead the way on a culture-war truce. He could drop his suit (and convince New Jersey to join him) and thus let Trump’s conscience protection stand.
This would anger Planned Parenthood, of course, but a leader with courage — who valued the free exercise of religion and the notion of pluralism — would stand up to special interests, and stand up for religious minorities.