Catholic Online Forum

I believe the SCOTUS consists of three liberals, three conservatives and one wildcard at the moment; if this takes long enough to be hears the court could be decidedly liberal in makeup due to replacements. If there is an abstaining vote resulting in a tie the tie breaker is very liberal, an Obama toady.

There was just as much reason to grant an injunction as not, the justice (sic) allowed her personal opinion to override common sense.

Regardless of the court makeup, the SCOTUS may well decide whether this country as we know it survives or not with the interpretations on the 1st, 2nd and 4th Amendments it is likely going to have to make in the next four years. If even one of them falls the rest will eventually crumble, they are totally interconnected.

While not always the case, often good men and women in these positions rise to the occasion and vote for the Constitution, and not with their political leanings. Let's hope and pray this will be one of those times.

Hobby Lobby is apparently going to risk the huge fines of more than a million dollars a day. These people are courageous. I'm impressed.

"The company will continue to provide health insurance to all qualified employees. To remain true to their faith, it is not their intention, as a company, to pay for abortion-inducing drugs.” — Kyle Duncan, General Counsel, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

http://www.lifenews.com/2012/12/28/hobb ... -in-fines/

Green continued, “The government is forcing us to choose between following our faith and following the law.” He vows to live his Christian convictions “come what may.” Will Washington smother dissent by bankrupting a thriving business, thus thrusting twenty-some thousand employees into the street? It’s up to the Department of Health and Human Services where unelected bureaucrats wield far more clout than anyone contemplated at Obamacare’s inception.

The White House has not intervened. Despite thousands of Obamacare waivers flowing per political calculus, principled resistance apparently warrants little respite. Hobby Lobby must bend to bureaucratic whim or the company may be compelled to pony over steep penalties.

Christians are often pilloried for imposing private morality on the public. Yet, this fiasco reveals the absurdity of the so-called “war on women.” Mr. Green seeks neither to outlaw contraception nor to prevent his workers from using birth control. Hobby Lobby’s health plans already cover contraceptives. Moreover, the “preventive medicine” in question remains widely, and cheaply, accessible elsewhere.

What pills employers furnish ought to be settled privately between management and labor. Instead, the public, or more precisely President Obama’s henchmen, foist mandated immorality on private businesses. “Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer,” chastises the administration “and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.” Thus has the Christian walk been narrowed via royal decree.

Submit or pay.

This isn’t about abortion; that’s another argument. Mr. Green merely wishes Washington wouldn’t corner him into defying his faith. But the Obama regime thinks recalcitrant businesses should be taxed into oblivion; an inverted tithe coercing the faithful into funding others’ infidelity. Perhaps this fulfills Obama’s campaign pledge to “punish our enemies.”

Craft chain Hobby Lobby said it has found a way to delay compliance with the Obamacare mandate, which requires companies to cover contraception in their employees' health care. Pastor Rick Warren has warned that religious freedom, at the heart of the company's battle, might become this decade's civil rights movement.

The evangelical Christian-owned company plans to shift the beginning of its employee health plan to temporarily avoid $1.3 million a day in fines for each day since Jan. 1 that it did not comply with the Affordable Care Act. Without the delay, the fine would now have totaled $18.2 million.

"Hobby Lobby discovered a way to shift the plan year for its employee health insurance, thus postponing the effective date of the mandate for several months," Peter M. Dobelbower, company's general counsel, said in a statement.

Dobelbower added that Hobby Lobby "does not provide coverage for abortion-inducing drugs in its healthcare plan," alluding to "morning-after" and "week-after" pills. The company will continue to "vigorously defend its religious liberty and oppose the mandate and any penalties."

On Dec. 26, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied the company's emergency request to block enforcement of the Health and Human Services "preventive services" mandate, which forces the company to go against their religious beliefs and cover contraception, sterilization and abortifacients in employees' health care.

However, the day after the company's plea for an emergency injunction was rejected, Kyle Duncan, general counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is legally representing Hobby Lobby, said the retail chain will continue their appeal.