Republican Missouri state Rep. Paul Wieland and his wife, Teresa, are reinstating their suit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate, which they claim violates their Catholic beliefs by granting their three daughters access to birth control through the family's government-provided insurance plan, The Huffington Post reported on Thursday.
A lower court threw out Wieland's case last year, saying that he didn't have standing to sue. Now his lawyer is arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court's June decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which allowed closely held corporations to deny contraceptive coverage to employees on religious grounds, has changed the dialogue. Wieland claims he has standing for his own suit and has appealed the lower court's ruling.
"The employees are to Hobby Lobby what the daughters are to Paul and Teresa Wieland," Timothy Belz, the Wielands' attorney, stated in front of a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis on Monday. "The government is holding a gun to our head and saying this: 'Either you give up your conscience or you give us your money.'"
Making birth control easily accessible to the Wielands' daughters - ages 13, 18 and 19 - would be "exactly the same" as forcing Mormon parents to "provide a stocked unlocked liquor cabinet in their house whenever they're away for their minor and adult daughters to use," argued Belz, who is special counsel with the public interest law firm the Thomas More Society.
One of the three judges said parents might have more control over their kids than employers, and that parents could just say to their kids, "We expect you do abide by our religious tenets." Belz replied, "Well, we all have high hopes for our kids, that is true. We all expect and want them to obey us, they don't always," according to MSNBC.
Wieland is running for state senate this year and has a 100-percent rating from Missouri Right to Life. Since Wieland is a public employee, the family gets its coverage from the Missouri Consolidated Health Care Plan, which they claim let them opt out of such coverage before the Affordable Care Act was instated.
