This time, the pesky conscience clause has to go. For the Greater Good of the volk, you see. Besides. Fuck these hoary old, knuckle-smacking bitterclingers who think their faith is somehow more important than Obama’s signature legislation and presidential legacy:

The Obama administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court not to exempt Catholic groups from an ObamaCare requirement to offer contraceptive coverage, after the high court gave them a temporary reprieve earlier this week.

The court filing comes in response to a surprise order — issued shortly before coverage under the law went into effect — by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The justice issued a stay late Tuesday preventing the government from enforcing the so-called contraceptive mandate against the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged.

The group of Catholic nuns argues that the contraceptive coverage requirement violates their religious beliefs. To get around the mandate, they claim they’d have to sign a “permission slip” authorizing others to provide contraceptives and “abortion drugs” — or pay a fine.

But the Justice Department, responding just before the Friday morning deadline, reiterated its argument that the group has no foundation for its case. The administration says religious nonprofit groups such of this one can certify that they don’t want to provide contraceptive coverage. In that case, it would be up to a third-party administrator to decide whether to provide it.

The DOJ filing noted that the administrator in this case “says it will not provide contraceptive coverage.”

“Applicants have no legal basis to challenge the self certification requirement or to complain that it involves them in the process of providing contraceptive coverage,” the administration claimed.

The Catholic group, though, has argued that even signing the certification form would violate the nuns’ beliefs.

A lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the group, blasted the administration over the filing.

“The government demands that the Little Sisters of the Poor sign a permission slip for abortion drugs and contraceptives, or pay of millions in fines. The Sisters believe that doing that violates their faith, and that they shouldn’t be forced to divert funds from the poor elderly and dying people they’ve devoted their lives to serve,” senior counsel Mark Rienzi said in a statement.

I’ve heard even a handful libertarians make the argument, here offered by the Obama Administration, that a third party buffer is a viable workaround to the religious liberty argument being offered by those of often profound faith against having to offer even tacit approval for what to them is the murder of a soul.

Whether you share those beliefs or not, the argument that “we were just following orders” didn’t work the last time it was tried — and I suspect that in the eyes of the truly faithful, who envision themselves standing in judgment some day, they don’t think God is going to buy it, either.

The fact that a travesty of a law that no one read was ruled Constitutional by a Supreme Court justice who had to re-write it to secure its ostensible validity has led us to the point where we are now forcing people off of their plans and away from their doctors while nuns are being asked to sign permission slips to allow abortions, shows us just how unmoored we’ve become from the founding ideals of this nation.

And also, what a bunch of totalitarian douchebags leftists and go-along, get-along “center-right” squishes are willing to be if given the opportunity.