Indiana: Standing Tall for Not *Too* Much Religious Liberty Just Yet

A lawyer friend writes from the Hoosier State:

Here is the order dismissing Notre Dame’s lawsuit against the HHS mandate. The judge finds that the case isn’t “ripe” because Notre Dame doesn’t have to comply with the mandate until a year from now. Federal jurisprudence is littered with exceptions to the “ripeness” doctrine for cases where harm is prospective and certain, particularly in cases involving questions of great public importance. The federal judiciary routinely uses this stuff to allow people to sue over spotted owls, federal disability laws, and dozens of other subjects close to the hearts of the elite (disability laws and spotted owls are about money as much as they are about spotted owls and the disabled). Of course the reason the one year hiatus was put into the mandate to begin with was to head off such lawsuits until the federal healthcare takeover was well underway, at which time Notre Dame and other opponents of the mandate can be accused of trying to “deprive everyone of health care” but upsetting the house of cards constituting the takeover. Why, at that point, if we let ND out of the mandate for religious reasons, wel’ll have to let everyone out of mandates for all sorts of religious reasons. But this is about freedom! We can’t let people do whatever they want in the name of freedom, can we? It would destroy our democratic way of life!

I wonder how the Mandate is faring in legal challenges elsewhere, and how long implementation can be held up in court?