The Obamacare HHS provision went into effect yesterday. Here is a round-up of posts with reaction to that.

The Day After the HHS Mandate Kicked In

Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review Online

Kolesar is a part owner of this family business established in 1961. The family is Catholic and considers the HHS contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing-drug “Preventative Services” mandate — which the White House has introduced as part of its health-care law — a clash with conscience. “We only ask that the government uphold freedom and not bully us into purchasing insurance for ourselves and our employees that would force us to abandon essential tenets of our faith,” Kolesar tells National Review.

Priests For Life Announces It Will Defy HHS Mandate

Ben Johnson,

The pro-life Catholic group had long signaled its impending defiance of what it considers an unjust and unconstitutional law.“We don’t need a year, nor do we need a moment, to determine what we are going to do, or to ‘adapt’ to the rule,” Fr. Pavone said early this year. “You don’t adapt to injustice; you oppose it.”

HHS Mandate Loses First Test in Federal Court

Ed Morrisssey, Hot Air

The injunction only applies to Hercules Industries, not the mandate as a whole, and it’s only temporary, as William Jacobson points out at Legal Insurrection. However, the usual paradigms for issuing temporary injunctions are that the judge believes the plaintiffs have a substantial chance of winning the case, and that the regulation or action being halted does significant damage to the plaintiff. That hints at a favorable ruling at the district court level for Hercules, which is definitely good news…

Fighting the Good Fight For Religious Freedom

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archdiocese of New York

Over the course of ing year, the effort to protect religious liberty and the freedom of conscience will continue. In the end, this is not about bishops, it is not about Catholics, it is not about contraceptives. It is about the ideals our nation was founded upon: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. You can’t do much better than the First Amendment to the Constitution. The founding fathers got it right. The HHS mandate gets it wrong. We are fighting to correct that wrong, in order to make sure that religious freedom continues for the generations e after us.