Contact: Monica M. Miller, Coalition Co-Director, 248-444-9096, mmmillerlife@gmail.com; Eric J. Scheidler, Coalition Co-Director, 773-251-8792, eric@prolifeaction.org; Tom Ciesielka, TC Public Relations, 312-422-1333, tc@tcpr.net
WASHINGTON, March 19, 2012 /Christian Newswire/ -- Taking a placating attitude and asking for a wide range of public comment, the Obama administration announced last week new accommodations on a controversial mandate requiring contraceptive coverage in health care plans. The accommodation includes issuing questions and suggestions for a 90-day comment period that began last Friday.
"With their March 16 statement, President Obama and Kathleen Sebelius are once again pretending to accommodate employers' conscientious objections to their HHS Mandate. The accounting tricks they're proposing are nothing but smoke and mirrors. At the end of the day, employers are still forced to provide free contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion-inducing drugs through their health plans," said Eric Scheidler, co-director of the Stand Up for Religious Freedom Rallies across the United States.
"But clearly Obama and Sebelius are feeling the heat. So it's all the more urgent for more Americans of faith to join our protest of the HHS Mandate, including the huge Rally for Religious Freedom taking place in over 120 cities across the U.S. at noon on March 23," Scheidler said.
The Stand Up for Religious Freedom Coalition Rallies will fight the HHS Mandate through direct action. The Coalition declares:
We protest the federal government's definition of what constitutes a religious institution through the narrowly constructed "exemption" to the HHS Mandate, a definition which is both false and beyond the federal government's authority to make.
We protest the fact that religious institutions, even after President Obama's so-called "accommodation," are being forced to facilitate contraception, sterilizations, and abortion-inducing drugs through the health plans they are mandated to provide.
We protest the Mandate forcing all businesses -- not just religious institutions -- to provide coverage of contraception, sterilizations, and abortion-inducing drugs, if even doing so violates their own moral convictions on these matters.
We protest the HHS Mandate because, in requiring all health plans to provide free contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs as "preventative care," it treats pregnancy and childbirth as a disease.
