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WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA, April 24, 2013 (LifeSiteNews) — A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Obama Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from enforcing its birth control mandate against a Catholic-owned for-profit lumber company.

The Catholic owners of the Seneca Hardwood Lumber Company (SHLC) will, at least for now, not be forced to provide health insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization, or abortion-causing drugs, due to their deeply-held religious beliefs against such measures.

“There is a strong public interest in protecting fundamental First Amendment rights,” ruled Judge Joy Flowers Conti of the Western Pennsylvania district court. “Plaintiffs showed that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their RFRA [Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993] claim; they will suffer irreparable harm absent injunctive relief; and the public interest favors granting injunctive relief.”

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Added Judge Conti, “In light of the myriad exemptions to the mandate’s requirements already granted and conceding that the requirement does not include small employers similarly situated to SHLC, the requirement is ‘woefully underinclusive’ and therefore does not serve a compelling government interest.”

Bowman, the senior legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom who represented the plaintiffs in the case, said: “This is a family that provides generous benefits in their business and they want to be free to live according to their faith, but this Obamacare mandate is coercing them to violate their conscience.”

The HHS birth control mandate has been the subject of over fifty federal lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. The Obama administration has attempted to assuage religious freedom concerns by issuing an “accomodation” that purports to protect religious employers. However, critics have dismissed the accomodation as a shell game, saying that it still requires employers to violate their conscience while maintaining the fiction of separation on paper.

Meanwhile, the mandate applies to all for-profit businesses, leaving religious business owners burdened by a mandate that they say violates their consciences.