NEW YORK — Roman Catholic dioceses, schools and other groups sued the Obama administration Monday in eight states and the District of Columbia over a federal mandate for most employers to provide workers free birth control as part of their health insurance.
The federal lawsuits represent the largest push against the mandate since President Barack Obama announced the policy in January. Among the 43 Catholic organizations suing are the University of Notre Dame, the archdioceses of Washington and New York, the Michigan Catholic Conference, the Catholic University of America and Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic publication.
“We have tried negotiation with the administration and legislation with the Congress, and we’ll keep at it, but there’s still no fix,” said New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now.”
The Health and Human Services Department adopted the rule to improve health care for women. Last year, an advisory panel from the Institute of Medicine, which advises the federal government, recommended including birth control on the list of covered services, partly because it promotes maternal and child health by allowing women to space their pregnancies.
However, many faith leaders from across religious traditions protested, saying the mandate violates religious freedom. The original rule includes a religious exemption that allows houses of worship to opt out but keeps the requirement in place for religiously affili- ated charities.
The mandate is part of the Obama administration’s overhaul of the health-care system, which the bishops say they otherwise support.
In response to the political furor, Obama offered to soften the rule so that insurers would pay for birth control instead of religious groups. However, the bishops and others have said that the accommodation doesn’t go far enough to protect religious freedom.
When some Catholic organizations broke with the bishops and greeted the accommodation positively, the bishops resolved that Catholic institutions must present a united front.
Health and Human Services Department spokesman Erin Shields said Monday that the department does not comment on pending litigation. When Obama announced the accommodation in February, he said no religious group would have to pay for the contraceptive services or provide the services directly.
Notre Dame’s president, the Rev. John Jenkins, said in a statement that the school decided to sue “after much deliberation, discussion and efforts to find a solution acceptable to the various parties.” The university argued that the mandate violates religious freedom by requiring many religiously affiliated hospitals, schools and charities to comply.
“We do not seek to impose our religious beliefs on others,” Jenkins said. “We simply ask that the government not impose its values on the university when those values conflict with our religious teachings.”
Richard W. Garnett, a professor of law and an associate dean at Notre Dame Law School who isn’t involved in the cases, said: “The cases are an important effort to vindicate what I think is a foundational freedom for Americans: religious liberty. It’s important that people understand it isn’t about a plot to prevent people from getting access to contraception. There are all kinds of ways the government can find to provide contraception to women who couldn’t qualify for Medicaid.”
Other religious colleges and institutions have already filed federal suit over the mandate, but observers had been closely watching for Notre Dame’s next step.
The university, among the best-known Catholic schools in the country, has indicated past willingness to work with Obama despite their differences with him on abortion and other issues. Notre Dame came under unprecedented criticism from U.S. bishops and others in 2009 for inviting Obama, who supports abortion rights, as commencement speaker and presenting him with an honorary law degree.
The federal suits were filed Monday in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio, Mississippi, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and the District of Columbia. At a news conference, Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik, whose diocese is among the plaintiffs, said the law firm Jones Day was handling the lawsuits pro bono nationally.
The defendants are the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and the Treasury.
Jones Day said in the statement that a provision authorizing the federal government to determine which organizations are sufficiently “religious” to warrant an exemption from the requirement is unconstitutional.
The institutions don’t qualify for exemptions, Chieko Noguchi, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Washington, said in an interview.
“The argument is over how the Health and Human Services Department defines religious ministry,” Noguchi said. “The definition is so narrow that our schools, our health-care and social-services entities wouldn’t qualify.”
Information for this article was contributed by Rachel Zoll, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Joseph Mandak of The Associated Press; by Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times; and by Sara Forden of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/22/2012