BROADCASTS.com

Image:  Hildegard of Bingen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen) and her nuns Adam J. White, Executive Director, C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, & Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason Uniersity; & Washington Post, in re: Little Sisters of the Poor v. Azar - Becket.  “History sometimes seems like one damn thing after another.”   In August 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a federal mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act. The mandate required employers to provide all FDA-approved contraceptives in their health insurance plans, including the week-after pill, free of cost. Despite the obvious religious liberty issues with a contraceptive mandate, HHS included only a narrow religious exemption—one that did not include religious non-profits like the Little Sisters of the Poor (http://thelittlesistersofthepoor.com/) , a Catholic order of nun that runs homes for the elderly poor across the country.  The Little Sisters’ Catholic beliefs about life and contraception meant that complying with the mandate was impossible. The Little Sisters initially tried to communicate their concerns with the federal government. In good faith, they believed that the government would grant them an exemption. After all, HHS already exempted thousands of other secular employers (http://thelittlesistersofthepoor.com/math) whose plans were “grandfathered” in under the new rule—including Exxon, Pepsi Bottling, and Visa—and even exempted the healthcare programs for the U.S. military. Instead, HHS doubled down, continued to refuse to exempt the Little Sisters, and threatened them with ruinous fines of tens of millions of dollars if they did not comply with the mandate.  Five years of litigation—including at the Supreme Court. https://medium.com/@adamjwhite/is-religious-liberty-dismantling-progressive-legal-victories-or-making-them-possible-in-the-5bcce0482c6c