Fox News host Megyn Kelly gave the National Organization for Women a chance to back away from the organization’s statement that the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns dedicated to serving the elderly impoverished, is “dirty.”

“Really, Patricia?” Kelly asked NOW’s former president Patricia Ireland on Tuesday’s edition of “The Kelly File.”

“Really, Megyn,” Ireland responded, adding that the nuns are among a group of 99 other groups including car companies, contractors and food companies, as if that made it all OK. It didn’t.

“I know, the nuns are opposed to birth control,” Kelly said. “It’s a shock.”

NOW’s list of their “Dirty 100″ is comprised of organizations that had the effrontery to use religion as the basis for a lawsuit against Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services contraception mandate.

Watch the exchange below.

NOW should realize that it’s not “dirty” to sue the administration — even the Obama administration. In fact, it’s an exercise of a Constitutional right.

The First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the … right of the people … to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” The litigation process is certainly included in the petition process.

The debate over the contraception mandate that HHS tacked on to the Affordable Care Act grew especially contentious after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week in favor of Hobby Lobby on that very issue.

Shortly after the Supreme Court announced its decision, President Obama’s Twitter account tweeted:

Throwback to last week when a woman—not her boss—made her own decisions about her health care. #TBT pic.twitter.com/xmQ5e7DFmW

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 3, 2014

Does he really want to go there? As Chicks on the Right commented:

You know who gets to make health decisions for women? Women. If women are not happy with the level of coverage their employer provides them, they get to decide whether or not they want to keep working for that employer. If women are not happy that their employer has different religious beliefs than they do, they get to decide to work for someone else.

Not only can the women leave their employment, they can simply pay the few bucks a month for the product out of their own pocket — exactly the way people have been doing for decades.

Chicks on the Right closed with this zinger:

But you know what many women don’t get to do? They don’t get to keep the doctors they were happy with before Obamacare. They don’t get to keep the health plans they were happy with before Obamacare. OBAMA is who took health decisions away from women.

In a more civilized time (maybe six years ago), when a presidential administration lost a court ruling near and dear to its heart, it accepted the court’s decision without whining about it. We called that “manning up,” “taking your lumps” and “dealing with reality and moving on.”

Both the president and the National Organization for Women would do well to remember and follow that.