Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT) has taken up the issue of the contraceptive mandate and is standing tough.
The contraception mandate issued by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has ignited a firestorm of controversy across the country. The mandate requires employers to provide free contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion producing drugs to their employees regardless of religious belief. The line has been drawn in the sand and politicians, clergy, and the public have taken sides. Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT), a current member and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is one of those who has come out strongly against it.
In a speech on February 9, Hatch referred to the HHS mandate as “ham-fisted.” In that speech Hatch said, “The nation’s Catholic bishops and many other religious institutions pleaded with the administration to grant broader waivers to avoid jeopardizing these institutions’ constitutional rights to freely exercise religion.
“But the administration, rather than side with millions of religious Americans who just want to be left alone to practice their faith, decided to throw in with the most radical of pro-abortion advocates. They decided to subordinate our central constitutional commitment to religious liberty to a radical agenda that is overtly hostile to these people of faith.”
On February 13 he joined with 42 Senate colleagues in filing a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court as part of the constitutional challenge to last year’s health law. On February 16 during a Senate hearing convened to discuss the mandate, Hatch said to Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, “I wrote you last July that your proposed contraceptive mandate would be ‘an affront to the natural rights to life, religious liberty and personal conscience.’ I note for the record that your response to my letter completely ignored this issue.”
Yesterday, in a stirring speech on the Senate floor televised by C-Span, he reiterated that position, calling the requirement an outgrowth of Obamacare, “an affront to our constitutional government, to the first right listed in our First Amendment — the right to free exercise of religion. You would not know that from my colleague’s remarks.”
Hatch said that liberals view religion with contempt and religious liberty as a threat to freedom in general. He reminded his audience that in truth, the opposite is true. People of faith have historically stood for liberty and that they deserve our respect, not our contempt. He feels it unconscionable that this mandate or any other law or regulation coming out of the U.S. government would force people of faith to make a choice between observing the law or following their conscience. On more than one occasion he called it unconstitutional.
In his speech yesterday, he also reminded his audience that earlier in the week, Sebelius admitted that she never consulted with the Roman Catholic bishops before announcing the “compromise,” and she admitted that she never requested any First Amendment analysis of this rule from the Department of Justice. The bishops have rejected the compromise and clerics of other faiths have joined them.
Hatch is not alone in his quest to overturn the mandate. Remember, he has joined with 42 other Senators in the lawsuit against it. They maintain its unconstitutionality based on the First Amendment, which reads very simply, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” They base their case upon these words, and say that the mandate does indeed prohibit the free exercise of religion since it forces people of faith to choose between complying with the law or violating the teachings of their faith. Hatch said no one should be forced into that position, especially Americans whose right to religious liberty is protected by the supreme law of the land, the Constitution.
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