(WND News Center)—Little Sisters of the Poor is a Catholic church organization that was targeted by Barack Obama’s schemes in Obamacare, in which he tried to force the Christian group to promotion contraception and abortions for employees.
They fought, for years, and won at the Supreme Court. And they won a second time, too.
But two states are defying that precedent, STILL, a decade and a half after the dispute was brought by the Democrat ex-president, and the courts are being asked once again to halt the harassment.
It is Becket that has confirmed the Little Sisters once again are asking a federal appeals court to block “a nationwide ruling that rejected their protection from the federal government’s contraceptive mandate.”
“The fourteen-year legal crusade against the Little Sisters has been needless, grotesque, and un-American,” said Mark Rienzi, president of Becket and lead attorney for the Little Sisters. “The states have no business trying to take away the Little Sisters’ federal civil rights. The Third Circuit should toss the states’ lawsuit into the dustbin of history and uphold the protection the Little Sisters already won at the Supreme Court…twice.”
“Fourteen years ago, the federal Department of Health and Human Services issued a federal mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). This mandate requires employers to provide contraceptives like the week-after pill in their health insurance plans, including some that can cause abortion. The original mandate exempted plans covering tens of millions of people for administrative convenience, but did not provide a religious exemption for groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns who have served the elderly poor for nearly 200 years. After the Little Sisters won protection against the federal government at the Supreme Court in 2016 and in a new federal rule in 2017, Pennsylvania and New Jersey sued to take away that protection,” Becket explained.
It was the high court in 2016 that said the government could not force the contraceptive mandate, and Washington responded with a rule that exempted groups like the Little Sisters.
However, abortion promoters in more than a dozen state governments in multiple cases immediately sued, as they intended to “strong-arm” the group “into either providing contraceptives or paying tens of millions in fines.”
A second trip to the Supreme Court resulted in a second victory for the Little Sisters.
However, Pennsylvania and New Jersey have refused to drop their efforts to take away the Little Sisters’ protection in the lower courts.
“For nearly 200 years, our order has welcomed the elderly poor and dying into our homes as we would welcome Christ Himself,” explained Little Sisters spokeswoman Mother Loraine Marie Maguire. “It is painful that we have spent more than a decade defending that mission in court. We simply want to continue our work without being forced to violate our faith, and we pray Pennsylvania and New Jersey will end this needless harassment.”
A lower court sided with the states’ anti-Christian agenda earlier this year, pushing the religious organization into the federal appeals court docket again.
In a statement to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the lawyers explained, on behalf of the Little Sisters, “For more than a decade, various government actors have tried to force religious objectors to obey a federal contraceptive mandate. As many courts have found—and as the federal government now openly admits— such coercion violates a federal civil rights law known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That is why the federal government stopped requiring religious objectors to comply with the federal contraceptive mandate in 2017. Indeed, presidential administrations of both political parties have now followed this course. Yet the Appellee States maintain that state governments somehow have an interest in forcing the federal government to force religious objectors to comply with the federal contraceptive mandate—even though the federal government need not have any contraceptive mandate at all, and even though the states themselves have chosen not to have such mandates of their own.”
The briefing continued, “When this case was last at the Supreme Court, seven Justices roundly rejected the States’ leading statutory arguments. The court explained that the federal agencies have ‘virtually unbridled discretion’ about what services to include in the contraceptive mandate and what exemptions to create. The court said that its decisions had ‘made it abundantly clear that, under RFRA, the departments must accept the sincerely held complicity-based objections of religious entities.’ The court emphasized that the agencies were not free to tell religious objectors that ‘the connection between what the objecting parties must do and the end that they find morally wrong is simply too attenuated.’ And the court said it had already ‘directed the parties … to ‘accommodate’ the free exercise rights of those with complicity-based objections to the self-certification accommodation.’ Nevertheless, after a four-year stay, and while adjudicating the states’ leftover arguments, the district court again misinterpreted RFRA so badly that it claimed the religious exemption rule was not even ‘rationally connected’ to solving the RFRA problem.
“Worse still, the district court’s analysis purports to revive—and treat as circuit precedent— RFRA analysis from Geneva College that has twice been vacated by the Supreme Court, was based on since-disproven factual claims, and is irreconcilable with the Supreme Court’s most recent opinion in this case. The district court’s statutory errors also lead inexorably to a constitutional conflict, because the original contraceptive mandate cannot constitutionally be re-imposed. The mandate is not a generally applicable law under the court’s recent decisions in Fulton and Tandon. The mandate’s discrimination among religious objectors is flatly unconstitutional under the court’s recent unanimous decision in Catholic Charities Bureau. And the complete lack of standards or principles to constrain agency discretion—what the Supreme Court has already recognized as ‘virtually unbridled discretion’—violates the non-delegation doctrine. These constitutional infirmities mean that the states’ claims are not redressable, because no court could lawfully provide the requested relief. Nor have the states offered any evidence that they have been harmed.”
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.