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Wide Ranging Challenge To Health Care Reform Includes Religion Claims

By Howard M. Friedman

A group of individuals and organizations yesterday filed a lawsuit in a Nevada federal court asserting a wide range of constitutional challenges to the requirement in this year's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that all U.S. citizens and legal residents maintain health care coverage.  Several of the challenges in the 55-page complaint are based on the free exercise clause, the establishment clause and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  The most straight forward are claims that the law forces Plaintiffs to fund abortion in violation of their religious beliefs and that it establishes "the secular religion of Socialism."  Some of the other religion claims in the complaint (full text) in People V US v. Obama, (D NV, filed 8/31/2010) are more elaborate:

47.... Plaintiff Joshua Hansen has a sincerely held religious belief that God will provide for his physical, spiritual, and financial well-being. Being forced to buy health insurance ...is highly offensive to his faith and beliefs. Plaintiff Joshua Hansen?s faith leads him to want to be free to obtain the health care of his own choosing, whatsoever health care he feels God directs him to obtain, including alternative forms of medicine, such as natural healing, homeopathic treatment, and other alternative forms of medical treatment not recognized or covered by PPACA....

73. Plaintiff TRACIE PISTOCCO is a Christian.... She has a sincerely held religious belief that charity is an obligation and sacrament of his faith as commanded by the Bible that people, as individuals?as opposed to government?are to care for one another. See Luke 14:13; Psalm 41:1, 2; 1 Timothy 6:17, 18. Part of this sincerely held religious belief is that all forms of Socialism are abhorrent and contrary to her Christian faith, because Socialism dictates, by force of law and without free will, that the government will take what the people have and distribute it to those who allegedly have less, regardless of latter?s need or attempt to care for themselves. She objects to PPACA because it compels her, under the guise of the "shared responsibility payment", to perform forced charity which violates the very foundation of his Christian faith.

74.... Christopher Hansen is a Christian and member and founder of the First Christian Fellowship of Eternal Sovereignty and believes that Socialism and its twin brothers, Communism, Fascism, and Marxism, are State/Civic religions and thus that Obamcare/ PPACA, an admittedly socialistic and compelled system of belief, violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, because it destroys his ability to exercise his religion according to the dictates of his own conscience. In his belief, Satan is the founder of compelled "charity," which violates the principles of free agency set forth in the scriptures in which Christopher Hansen believes, including the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and the Constitution of the United States of America, which he believes to be inspired by God and the only true political religion. To force him to participate in Obamacare thus violates his free exercise of religion under the First Amendment.

Courthouse News Service reports on the filing of the case.
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Full post as published by Religion Clause on September 01, 2010 (boomark / email).