For the past four years, the Catholic League has been fighting an array of public policies initiated by the Biden administration that touch on serious moral issues. We are happy to report that they have finally succumbed to pressure and are dropping four of their most morally bankrupt policies.
On December 23, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it has withdrawn a rule change that would have barred religious non-profits from claiming an exemption to the HHS mandate that was initiated by the Obama administration; it would require employers to provide abortion and contraceptive coverage in their healthcare plans.
This means that the Little Sisters of the Poor, and other religious social service agencies, have cleared another bar in their pursuit of maintaining fidelity to their mission. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court twice granted religious exemptions to the HHS mandate, the Biden team still sought to deny them; they have finally backed off.
We have been fighting the HHS mandate from the get-go. It was added to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, in August 2011 (it became law one year later). On September 19, 2011, a month after it was announced, we registered the first of a long series of objections.
We noted that the HHS mandate “made an exception for religious employers,” but we hastened to add that “when looked at closer, it became apparent that the exception was flatulent. To wit: a religious employer was defined, in part, as one that primarily employs, and serves, persons who share its religious tenets.”
This was meant to cover houses of worship, but would extend no further. For example, it would punish the Little Sisters, and Catholic schools and hospitals, because they serve non-Catholics. But they wouldn’t be Catholic if they were forced to discriminate on the basis of religion!
Over the next four months, we issued six additional public statements on the flawed HHS mandate. Then, on January 23, 2012, we made our first comment noting that the mandate was meant to force these Catholic agencies to provide for abortion-inducing drugs in their healthcare plan. Though the HHS mandate does not mention these drugs, per se, it was cleverly inserted in the provision that said “contraceptives” covered “emergency contraception (ulipristal acetate), and any additional contraceptives approved, granted, or cleared by the FDA.”
In other words, abortion-inducing drugs such as ulipristal (known as “Ella”)—which is similar to the abortion pill RU-486—was to be included in Catholic employee healthcare plans. We subsequently issued more than a dozen public statements condemning the HHS mandate. Now, finally, this intolerant policy has been scrapped.
The second policy change made by the Biden administration prohibits the Department of Defense (DOD) from covering transgender drug prescriptions of minors. But it was not done for principled reasons. This provision was part of the huge defense spending bill that Biden wanted, but due to Republican resistance on including transgender drug coverage for minors, he had to nix it.
In Biden’s first year in office, we released a three-part series on the physical and psychological damage that transgender health procedures can cause; we also addressed how young people are being indoctrinated into thinking this is normal. So we are delighted that Biden had to kill the drug prescription provision in the DOD budget.
The third policy change that Biden made at the end of December was its decision to withdraw a rule that would force schools that receive federal funds to allow boys and young men to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order saying that children “will not be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports” on the basis of their declared sex. This was a perverse reading of Title IX, the 1972 law that mandated that women could not be discriminated against in sports. It has nothing to do with males competing against females.
From 2019 to the present, we issued nearly 50 public statements and reports warning of the dangers of men crashing girls’ and women’s spaces, including sports. We also published over 40 articles on this subject in our monthly journal, Catalyst, and I included a chapter on transgenderism in my 2024 book, Cultural Meltdown. To say we are delighted with this outcome would be an understatement.
We are most proud of our role in getting the Biden administration to withdraw a proposed rule that would have rescinded a rule initiated when Trump was president that secured the right of religious student organizations at public colleges and universities to maintain their beliefs and practices, free from administrative interference.
The Department of Education said it made the change because during the period when public comment was allowed, it received 58,000 comments, and many expressed opposition to rescinding the Trump rule. On February 28, 2023, we detailed how the rights of religious students were being decimated on campus. More important, we called for Catholics to register their objections, providing them with directions on how to make their voice heard.
Resistance matters, and we are happy to have participated.
