Title: Hobby Lobby 101: explaining the Supreme Court's birth control ruling - CSMonitor.com
Headings: Hobby Lobby 101: explaining the Supreme Court's birth control ruling
Hobby Lobby 101: explaining the Supreme Court's birth control ruling
July 10, 2014
What was the basis of the owners’ religious objections?
What Supreme Court’s jettisoning of precedent may mean for future
Do they oppose all birth control?
Some religious owners of corporations oppose all birth control. Are those employers now entitled to eliminate birth control in every form from their company health care plans?
What was the basis for the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision?
Did the First Amendment ’s guarantee of free exercise of religion apply in the Hobby Lobby case?
Why didn’t the First Amendment apply in the Hobby Lobby case?
How does the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protect religious liberty?
What would be the least restrictive means of providing cost-free contraceptives to female workers at Hobby Lobby?
Don’t women have a constitutional right to access to birth control and abortion?
Doesn’t a company owner’s insistence on a religious accommodation result in the imposition of his or her religious beliefs on employees?
What kind of accommodation will the government authorize in the wake of the Hobby Lobby decision?
Politics with respect

Content: They do. But there is no constitutional right to have someone else pay for it. The question in the Hobby Lobby case was whether the government can force someone else to pay for a woman’s contraceptives even though that person has religious objections to doing so. Doesn’t a company owner’s insistence on a religious accommodation result in the imposition of his or her religious beliefs on employees? It would do so only if the government was unwilling to provide a less restrictive accommodation. RFRA requires the government to pursue the “least” restrictive means in terms of any burden on religious beliefs. Traditionally, religious liberty has been revered as a positive attribute of American society. In the Hobby Lobby case, government lawyers argued that a broad assertion of religious freedom poses a threat to American workers, particularly female workers. That threat to the receipt of free contraceptives by female employees outweighed any threat to religious liberty, the government said. Four Supreme Court justices agreed with this view.