HHS Mandate is unconstitutional.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”
A Catholic hospital would be an establishment of a religion. Furthermore, forcing an individual or company to supply something that clearly goes against their faith would be prohibiting the “free exercise thereof.”
-Jo
LOL I like how you fail to mention the “no law respecting” bit. Also, a Catholic hospital isn’t an establishment of religion, it’s an establishment of health.
Be proud, I went and got my Constitutional Law book out so as to make this easy for you.
So, let’s look at Catholic Hospitals. Like every other hospital, they accept public funding in order to stay open. Disregarding the fact that in many communities, Catholic hospitals are the only hospital available to them, this public funding is essential to why you are so very wrong here.
Any institution that receives public funding is subject to the laws of the land. This too, is in the Constitution. It’s known as the Commerce Clause, and as precedence will show, gives the government the right to make regulations and laws for businesses that use public federal funding. Prime case precedents; Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States and Katzenbach v. McClung, in which the government was able to bar racial discrimination in motels and restaurants because the food, the machines to prepare the food, or some other part of running the business had “moved” between state lines.
These same ideas are why the government is able to enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act, which fixes minimum wage and maximum hours, as well as banning child labor. The HHS Contraception Mandate is similar here in that it is telling employers to provide a demanded medication (99% of American women use birth control at some point in their lives).
Furthermore, even if the Commerce Clause didn’t provide justification, your argument is invalid. To violate the Establishment Clause, the government would have to mandate that people TAKE contraception. Mandating that employers supply the medication is vastly different than mandating taking the medication.
Strange enough, the HHS mandate passes all the applicable test for determining if the government has violated the establishment clause, the lemon test, the endorsement test, and the agostini test.
tl;dr You’re wrong.
klondikebar123 just blew this whole thing away.
