Campus Notes

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) announced two additional lawsuits to block the Obama administration’s mandate for insurance coverage of sterilization, contraception and some abortifiacients, following the example of Belmont Abbey College, a Catholic institution which filed suit last November.

The suits announced today are by Louisiana College in Alexandria, La., a Southern Baptist institution, and Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., a Reformed Presbyterian institution.

“The Obama administration has purposely transformed a non-existent problem–access to contraception–into a constitutional crisis,” said ADF-allied attorney and co-counsel Mike Johnson, dean of Louisiana College’s Pressler School of Law. “This mandate offers no choice; Americans either comply and abandon their convictions or resist and be punished.”

“At Geneva College, we only have one Lord, and he does not live in Washington, D.C.,” said Geneva College President Ken Smith. “The First Amendment protects Americans from mandates that require us to act against our own convictions. We find the mandate to provide our faculty, staff, and students with insurance that provides pills to abort babies totally abhorrent and unacceptable. The government shouldn’t be able to force anyone to buy or sell insurance that subsidizes morally objectionable treatments.”

ADF has worked closely with The Cardinal Newman Society to advise faithful Catholic colleges and universities on ways to protect against federal threats to their religious liberty.  ADF attorneys authored the appeal submitted last September by 18 Catholic colleges and The Center for the Advancement for Catholic Higher Education, a division of The Cardinal Newman Society.  Other advisories authored by ADF include “Protecting Catholic Colleges from External Threats to Their Religious Liberty” by ADF attorney Kevin Theriot, an August 2011 analysis of the HHS mandate, and a July 2011 analysis of the legality of single-sex residences at Catholic colleges.