OKLAHOMA CITY — Four Christian universities in Oklahoma have filed suit against the Obama administration to challenge the requirement that they provide insurance coverage for sterilizations, contraception and drugs that they believe induce abortions.
Southern Nazarene University, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, Oklahoma Baptist University and Mid-America Christian University are being represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is currently handling 13 other lawsuits pertaining to the Affordable Care Act.
“Christian colleges should remain free to operate according to the beliefs that define them,” commented ADF Senior Counsel Gregory S. Baylor in a statement announcing the suit. “This mandate leaves religious employers with no real choice: you must either comply and abandon your religious freedom and conscience, or resist and be taxed for your faith. If religious convictions mean nothing in this context, there is no stopping what the government can ultimately do.”
The legal challenge explains that if Christian universities “follow their religious convictions and decline to participate in the government’s scheme, they will face, among other injuries, enormous fines that will cripple their operations.” It also asserts that the “rationale for entirely exempting churches and integrated auxiliaries from the regulations–their employees are likely to share their religious convictions–applies equally to the Universities.”
Representatives for Oklahoma Wesleyan University also explained their personal reasons behind the suit.
“We are filing suit because we believe God defines what is living and what is dead; you and I do not. We believe human beings are unique and exceptional and, unlike other creatures, we are made in the likeness of God,” officials wrote in a piece published by the Bartlesville Examiner Enterprise. “We believe that the life of all people regardless of their status, age, race, gender, vitality or handicap should be protected and defended. It is God and God alone who can give and take human life.”
“We are filing suit because we believe God is God, not the government,” they continued, “and that ‘we must obey God rather than men.’”
As previously reported, other Christian colleges and universities nationwide have likewise filed legal challenges against Obamacare, refusing to comply no matter what.
“The Sixth Commandment says thou shall not murder,” stated Louisiana College President Joe Aguillard, who filed suit last year. “The government is imposing their religion of murder on us and I think it’s time for the people of our country to wake up and stand together.”
“I guess President Obama will have to come down to Louisiana College with whatever means they want to stop us,” he added. “We are going to have, as we say in French, a tete-a-tete.”
Geneva College President Ken Smith likewise made headlines for vowing to stand his ground at his Pennsylvania-based institution.
“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,” he said. “The government shouldn’t be able to force anyone to buy or sell insurance that subsidizes morally objectionable treatments.”
“As the colonists, in what King George called ‘the Presbyterian Revolt,’ responded to their earthly king with chants of ‘No king but King Jesus,’ so too the president of this Presbyterian college, Ken Smith of Geneva, has said, ‘At Geneva College, we have only one Lord, and he does not live in Washington, D.C.,’” added the publication Human Events.
To date, the government has overwhelmingly lost its challenges in the courts–at least in regard to thwarting preliminary injunctions–by a score of 30-5.