There was a truly disturbing attack on religious liberty last week. It was another reminder that even with a pro-religious liberty majority on the Supreme Court, attacks on our First Amendment freedoms continue.
You may know little about a religious order named the Little Sisters of the Poor. You may also be wondering why such a humble-sounding group of women are in the news again—as they have been for the last fourteen years. The answer is relevant for Evangelicals, as well as all Americans who value religious liberty.
The Little Sisters of the Poor are exactly what they sound like. These women are nuns who devote themselves to prayer and to the mission of providing care and comfort to the sick and the poor, the aged and dying. They take nothing for themselves.
Well, beginning in the wake of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama and his minions viciously attacked the Little Sisters. The administration demanded, with the force of law, that as an employer of more than fifty people, the Little Sisters fund contraception and abortifacient drugs for their employees.
The legal history is complicated. The Obama law provided a narrow set of religious exemptions for churches, but other religious nonprofits, such as the Little Sisters, were left out in the cold.
Don’t underestimate the determination of these saintly women to fight for their religious convictions. With the aid of the Becket Fund, a litigation group that leads the battle for true civil liberties, the Little Sisters championed their rights all the way to the Supreme Court.
Twice.
Both times they were vindicated—most recently in May 2016 when the Supreme Court ruled in the Little Sisters’ favor, protecting them from Obamacare’s ruinous fines.
The case was a contest among lawyers. The battle continued in the lower courts for another two years until June 2018 when the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the nuns’ religious freedom.
In President Trump’s first term, his administration issued a final rule protecting the Little Sisters while “offering alternative means for women to obtain free contraception,” noted the Becket Fund.1
This should have been the end of the matter, and for seven years it was. Until now.
Last week, the roof fell in yet again on the Little Sisters. A federal district judge in Philadelphia ruled against the nonprofit in a lawsuit launched by the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. What’s more, Judge Wendy Beetlestone (not a misprint) issued a national injunction against the sisters, striking down the 2018 Trump rule that had given the ministry safe harbor at last.2
If you look for outcries against authoritarianism—a means by which a single judge can smother the rights of the Little Sisters after fourteen years of litigation and expense—you’ll look in vain. Twice victorious at the Supreme Court, protected without depriving women of any medical product, the Little Sisters are once again facing persecution.
If this latest example of judicial overreach doesn’t disturb you, either because the Supreme Court will almost certainly overrule it in a year or two or because, like me, you’re not Catholic, I get that at one level. But that’s not the way to see this one.
Why is the Left going full steam to browbeat a religious ministry dedicated to the poorest and sickest among us and to force them to pay for readily available drugs and devices that in the nuns’ view prevent and take human life?
What’s in it for the secular neo-Marxists that prompt them to fight for so many years for such an unpopular and illegal mandate that violates core tenets of a group’s faith? Why this when the Little Sisters employ relatively few people—people who embrace their mission and have dozens of low-cost contraceptive choices at the local CVS if they want them?
This is a revealing moment, and we shouldn’t miss its message: The secular neo-Marxist Left has a vision of the future that does not include us, our beliefs, or our God-given rights.
They lecture us about diversity, equity, and other concepts, but they envision—and will not give up their pursuit of—an America where we are not free to carry our values, our deepest religious convictions, into our public life.
Today – yet again – it’s punishment for a small group of sweet Catholic nuns who labor daily to bathe the elderly, provide their medical care, and feed and encourage them at little or no cost to them or to the public. They are, for lack of a better term, the kind of “social justice warriors” the Left claims they love and honor.
This case, once more forcing the nuns to expend time and resources to defend principles that had already been vindicated, shows just what today’s socialist Democrats are all about.
Not surprising is that this persecution comes because of actions originally taken by Joe Biden and other Catholics in his administration.
This is the nature of religious liberty battles.
Today, the conflict is Catholic moral teaching. But the fray is not limited to them. The same forces—Democrat governors, the ACLU, and Mikey Weinstein and his minions—have gone after every evangelical group in the country. Over the years, Dr. James Dobson and I have faced repeated attacks and threats simply for defending faith, family, and freedom.
The Left doesn’t want you free. They don’t want your children and grandchildren to live in a society that respects your values. The Left will not rest until you and yours kneel at their secular altars, proclaim their “heroes” as your heroes, and salute their every policy and practice.
From transgender campaigns and compelled pronouns to the First Amendment and the rest of our Constitution, they want your tax dollars to salute their ideology.
For a brief time in 2025, we have pushed them back. But make no mistake. If the secular socialist Left wins back Congress and the White House, our basic liberties will again be threatened.
If you don’t vote, if you haven’t registered to vote, if you don’t speak and write to your representatives, you are inviting a toll that, as great as it may be for you, will be vastly worse for our children and grandchildren.
Our nation’s soul is at stake, and saving it is worth every ounce of our strength.
- “Reaching Souls International v. Azar.” Becket, April 29, 2019. https://becketfund.org/case/reaching-souls-international-v-price/.
- Andrea M. Picciotti-Bayer, “Little Sisters of the Poor Face New Legal Assault on Religious Freedom,” National Catholic Register, August 15, 2025, https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/little-sisters-of-the-poor-coercion-eastern-pennsylvania.
