Goddamn Christers.  Always fucking up the free exercise of libertinism / uterus scraping in the name of some goofy idea about religious freedom .  Christ.  Don’t these Heavenhumpers watch Bill Maher?

Here’s an encouraging update on the nationwide legal challenges to ObamaCare by religious institutions that will be forced to provide insurance coverage for such things as abortion drugs, birth control and sterilizations that violate their beliefs.

This story is a week old, actually. Strangely, you haven’t seen any real coverage of this development in mainstream media, perhaps because it concerns a crucial legal setback for Barack Obama and Kathleen Sebelius in a New York federal court.

As is Eric Holder’s style when his Justice Department is challenged, he attempts not to argue the typically weak legal issues he has but to challenge the standing or timing of the challengers. That’s worked in some of the 42 religious lawsuits filed over ObamaCare’s pending implementation that the churches say violate their constitutional protections for religious freedom.

But that strategy did not work in the Eastern District Federal Courtroom of Judge Brian Cogan. For the first time, a federal judge allowed this constitutional challenge of ObamaCare to proceed.

The Obama administration had sought to have the case by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York thrown out because of its so-called “temporary safe harbor” provision.

That was a statement last winter by Health and Human Services that it would not seek to enforce or prosecute religious institutions for failing to provide such controversial coverage until later next year while steps to address their concerns were developed.

There have been no concrete attempts made to provide such steps. And privately, now skeptical church officials confide the president had previously assured them even before his February news conference that their worries were already addressed, which they were not.

Judge Cogan completely rejected Obama’s argument, calling the administration’s punitive steps against the religious institutions an “actual and well-founded fear” that is “looming and certain” much like “a speeding train that is coming towards plaintiffs.”

He chided the administration as having had ample time to address the institutions’ concerns already. And then Judge Cogan let forth with this:

“The First Amendment does not require citizens to accept assurances from the government that, if the government later determines it has made a misstep, it will take ameliorative action.

“There is no, ‘Trust us, changes are coming’ clause in the Constitution.

“To the contrary, the Bill of Rights itself, and the First Amendment in particular, reflect a degree of skepticism towards governmental self-restraint and self-correction.”

How quaint, Mr Justice Quainty McQuaint Quaint.

But as we all know by now, there is nothing in the Bill of Rights that can’t be circumvented, either by appeals to the Commerce Clause or by calling something a tax — even when it wasn’t introduced as one and had magically to be transformed into one by a powerful judicial wizard.

And this idea of limited government that underlies the nod to “governmental self-restraint”? You didn’t make that.  The Constitution did. And what can be more entirely governmental than the Constitution?

The post-modern defense rests.