Why We Have Gone to Court against the Obama Mandate

By WILLIAM ARMSTRONG, KEN SMITH, AND JOE AGUILLARD

We are presidents of three private, evangelical colleges throughout the country. Our colleges enrich each of our communities. We educate young men and women for virtuous and productive roles in society. We engage in service and charitable outreach. We provide jobs to many hundreds of citizens and provide their families generous health insurance.

But the Obama administration has passed a rule that will penalize our colleges with faith-based fines merely because we center our beliefs about the sanctity of human life on the Bible, not on the demands of federal bureaucrats. The administration's mandate that religious employers provide coverage of abortion-inducing drugs for their faculty, staff, and students is a bridge too far in America.

This "conscience tax" is a blatant violation of the freedoms of religion and speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and affirmed by federal laws such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This mandate would be unjust even if it applied only to those who accept government funding, but it does much more than that. It applies to private, religious employers just because they exist in American society, regardless of whether they receive government funding.

That is why our colleges have each filed suit in federal court to stop this illegal overreach.
Our suits are not directed at "contraception," although some would like you to believe that. Rather, they are about the government forcing us and other religious organizations to provide access to drugs and services that violate our deepest religious convictions. Specifically, we would be forced to offer abortion-inducing drugs as a part of our insurance benefits, and that is a line we cannot cross....
Wall Street Journal

I couldn't agree more!