Opinion

Cardinal Dolan’s ObamaCare victory

For a while it looked as though the president had got the best of the cardinal.

Two years ago, Timothy Cardinal Dolan left an Oval Office meeting believing he had President Obama’s word that his health-care regulations would respect the conscience rights of religious organizations. A few weeks later, the president phoned to say the Department of Health and Human Services was going ahead with a mandate requiring even church groups to underwrite insurance that paid for birth control, sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs.

Now a court has just handed the cardinal a big victory — and the president a huge defeat. In a landmark ruling, Judge Brian Cogan of the Eastern District of New York not only found that the president’s mandate violates religious freedom, he issued the first permanent injunction against it.

Other federal courts have also found the mandate a violation of religious freedom, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear cases involving for-profit companies. But this ruling deals with religious nonprofits and is particularly clear about the requirements imposed on government by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed in 1993.

Judge Cogan noted the strong element of government coercion, backed up by hefty fines. He found the administration’s accommodation largely hollow. And he pointed out the government can hardly claim it has a “compelling interest” in enforcing this mandate when it has itself granted many exemptions.

This is a victory to be savored, not just by Catholics but by anyone concerned with the bedrock constitutional tenet of religious freedom. We congratulate the cardinal for his win, but note that it comes in a battle he never should have had to fight.