By Steven Ertelt
Tyndale House Publishers, which publishes Bibles and other Christian
books and multimedia, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the Obama
administration’s abortion pill mandate.
Tyndale House is one of the world’s largest privately held Christian
publishers of books, Bibles, and digital media, but it is apparently not
religious enough to meet the narrowly-drawn pot-out the Obama
administration placed in the HHS mandate.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing Tyndale House filed
a lawsuit and said it is subject to the mandate because Obama
administration rules say for-profit corporations are categorically
non-religious, even though Tyndale House is strictly a publisher of
Bibles and other Christian materials. Tyndale is owned by the non-profit
Tyndale House Foundation, a Christian group which provides grants to
help meet the physical and spiritual needs of people around the world.
“Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” said Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman.
Bowman added: “To say that a Bible publisher is not religious is
patently absurd. Tyndale House is a prime example of how ridiculous and
arbitrary the Obama administration’s mandate is. Americans today clearly
agree with America’s founders: the federal government’s bureaucrats are
not qualified to decide what faith is, who the faithful are, and where
and how that faith may be lived out.”
The mandate forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral
convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs,
sterilization, and contraception under threat of heavy penalties.
“ObamaCare demands that Americans choose between two poison pills:
either desert your faith by complying, or resist and be punished,”
Bowman said.
On July 27, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys obtained the first-ever court order
against the mandate on behalf of Colorado’s Hercules Industries and the
Catholic family that owns it. That order temporarily suspends the
mandate only against Hercules Industries while its lawsuit goes forward
in court.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys are also litigating three other
lawsuits against the mandate: one in Indiana on behalf of Indiana’s
Grace College and Seminary and California’s Biola University; one in
Pennsylvania on behalf of Geneva College and The Seneca Hardwood Lumber
Company and its owners, the Hepler family; and one in Louisiana on
behalf of Louisiana College. The lawsuits represent a large
cross-section of Protestants and Catholics who object to the mandate.
Tyndale House Publishers v. Sebelius was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
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