Churches’ legal strategy fighting abortion includes siding with energy industry
Churches want freedom to purchase health insurance without abortion coverage
The list of entities asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in favor of an energy company in Diamond Alternative Energy v. Environmental Protection Administration sounds like it could be a who’s who of the energy industry: Western States Petroleum, Texas Oil & Gas Association, The American Petroleum Institute and The Sulphur Institute are just a few.
And then there are the Foothill Church and the Cedar Park Assembly of God.
In an example of the adage that politics makes strange bedfellows, the two churches recently submitted a friend-of-the-court brief asking the high court to rule in favor of Diamond Alternative Energy, which is seeking to overturn a Biden-era regulatory decision designed to expand the use of electric vehicles.
The churches are weighing in on the legal dispute not because they have a position on electric vehicles, but because they hope that a ruling by the Supreme Court would help them in their efforts to avoid state-level requirements that force them to by employee health insurance policies that includes coverage for elective abortions.
The Foothill and Cedar Park churches are located in Glendora, Calif., and Kirkland, Wash., respectively. The churches’ legal brief describes the churches as ones “that believe and teach that humans are created in the image of God and that every human life is valuable from the moment of conception,” meaning that they “cannot participate in, facilitate, or indicate approval of abortion in any way.”
The legal dispute, in the form it will be heard by the Supreme Court, probably this spring, involves the technical legal issue of standing, which plays a part in nearly every lawsuit and is not directly related to environmental or religious issues. Instead, it relates to the circumstances under which a party is entitled to bring a legal action before a court.
The gist of the case is that Diamond Alternative Energy claims it will be hurt by certain regulatory decisions even though the regulations weren’t written to apply to Diamond directly, and those harms entitle it to fight the EPA in court. Diamond says the regulatory decisions will depress the market for its products, and that these economic losses are traceable to an EPA decision. Such economic harm is predictable, Diamond says, and it is only common sense that it should be able to appeal the regulatory change even though the regulatory change didn’t specifically target the business.
The EPA has yet to file a brief supporting its position.
Churches predict catastrophic harm
The two churches claim that courts in California and Washington have used rulings on standing to avoid ruling on whether the churches could be forced to buy insurance policies with abortion coverage. They claim that doing so has created a legal burden on churches that has prevented them from fully making their arguments in court:
Endorsing California’s theory of standing here would catastrophically harm houses of worship and other religious entities. Hostile governments will weaponize this newly heightened standing requirement to evade judicial review of policies designed to suppress religious exercise. And because regulated industries are reluctant to participate in third-party litigation and churches often have limited resources, the harms imposed by States like California and Washington will often go unchecked.
The churches claim that being denied standing has “caused churches significant harm by delaying justice and prolonging their constitutional injuries.”
They also suggest that state agencies have written laws or regulations with the intent of making their actions more difficult to challenge: “Governments can achieve their political goals by targeting disfavored entities through indirect regulation of third-party industries,” the churches say in their friend-of-the-court brief.
The churches are represented by attorneys from the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the country’s best-known law firms dealing with religious-freedom issues on behalf of religious conservatives.