Several Southern Baptist and secular organizations have filed a friend-of-the-court brief to support a legal challenge to the Obama administration’s contraception mandate by the Southern Baptist Convention’s insurance provider and evangelical ministries.“Scripture and Southern Baptist belief prohibit not only direct and personal wrongdoing, but also the enabling, authorizing, incentivizing or aiding of another in doing what the Christian believes to be sin,” states the brief filed by Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. and other Southern Baptist leaders.
The brief filed during this week urges the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver to uphold a lower court’s temporary and preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the Department of Health and Human Services mandate, which requires employers to provide insurance coverage for some abortion drugs, sterilization and contraception.
“Christian doctrine teaches that believers who knowingly aid or abet another’s wrongdoing have themselves done wrong,” the brief adds. “Accordingly, a statute or regulation requiring a Southern Baptist individual or ministry to be complicit in conduct that the Christian faith teaches is morally wrong forces that person or ministry into an impossible choice – to either violate conscience or violate the law – and imposes a substantial burden on the exercise of religion.”
Amici include the National Association of Evangelicals, Prison Fellowship, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Christian Medical Association, the Christian Legal Society, the American Center for Law and Justice, Concerned Women for America, Americans United for Life, the Judicial Education Project, and law professor Helen Alvaré.
They were joined by several other Southern Baptist groups, including the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the International Mission Board, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Click here to continue reading…
SOURCE: ANUGRAH KUMAR
CHRISTIAN POST
BCNN1 WP 