A controversial mandate introduced by the Obama Administration, which insists that religious employers place their 
workers in insurance schemes that provide them with free abortifacient and sterilisation services, went into effect yesterday.
Opponents of the measure seemed willing to let the landmark date pass without much comment as they prepare for future court battles.
Despite Wednesday’s near-silence, moves to undo the mandate are still going ahead, but they are unlikely to be heard in the courts for several months. Catholic organisations have filed lawsuits in 43 different courts opposing the law.
“What the bishops have said or done still stands, Don Clemmer, a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told CBS News.
The implementation of the mandate comes less than a week after a federal judge in Colorado gave a victory to opponents of the law.
U.S. District Judge John Kane temporarily blocked the government from enforcing the requirement on Denver-based Hercules Industry, a manufacturer of heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment, which is run by a Catholic family.
Paul Newland, one of four siblings who own Hercules, told Denver’s CBS affiliate, the company felt it had to fight. “We have to choose between one of two evils,” he said. “We can either abandon our faith, which is important to us, or we can pay heavy fines which would cripple our business.
“Religion is the fabric of us as owners and many of the people that work for us,” he added.
Matt Bowman, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, a group which helps fight legal cases involving religious freedom, said: “We’re very pleased the judge recognised that religious freedom applies to families and their activities in business and that a mandate that violates religious freedom cannot be imposed against faithful Christian believers”.
Last week’s court order halts the Health and Human Services mandate for Hercules Industries while the lawsuit is pending. “In the meantime, these bureaucrats in Washington can’t decide what faith is or who the faithful are,” Bowman said.
Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, commented, “The Colorado case is very positive news. The issue hasn’t been fully decided, but it’s heading in the right direction. We are delighted that it pertained to a private Catholic employer.”
Judge Kane wrote in his ruling that the federal government’s arguments in Newland v. Sebelius, that it had a public-health interest to compel private companies to offer abortifacient services, are “countered, and indeed outweighed, by the public interest in the free exercise of religion”.
“On balance, the threatened harm to plaintiffs, impingement of their right to freely exercise their religious beliefs and the concomitant public interest in that right strongly favor the entry of injunctive relief,” Kane wrote.
The judge also said that the government’s lawyers had not proven that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had taken less-restrictive means of ensuring access to all Food and Drug Administration-approved forms of birth control rather than mandating that all employer-provided health-insurance plans provide those services.
The government’s arguments that allowing exemptions for private companies like Hercules Industries — which manufactures and distributes heating, ventilation and air conditioning products — would cripple the HHS birth-control statutory scheme was undermined by the exemptions already granted to some religiously affiliated employers, employers with grandfathered health-insurance plans and temporarily for some nonprofit groups.
“The government has exempted over 190 million health-plan participants from the preventive-care coverage mandate; this massive exemption completely undermines any compelling interest in applying the preventive-care coverage mandate to (Hercules),” Kane wrote.
Kane’s injunction allows Hercules to keep its current self-insured employee health plan — which does not cover birth control — while the lawsuit is pending.
However, the issue remains far from settled. While sounding a sceptical note, the judge said the government can still present arguments to justify that its mandate for-profit businesses like Hercules does not violate religious liberty and that it is also the least-restrictive means in furthering a “compelling interest”.