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: Instead of analyzing the case from a constitutional perspective, the high court examined whether the ACA’s contraception mandate complied with the requirements of a federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Why didn’t the First Amendment apply in the Hobby Lobby case? In a 1990 decision, Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court ruled that religious groups were not entitled under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to an exemption or accommodation from neutral, generally applicable laws. Amid complaints from religious groups, Congress responded by passing the RFRA in 1993. The law sought to establish by statute what had been the essence of the constitutional safeguard under the Free Exercise Clause prior to the high court’s 1990 decision in the Smith case. Instead of applying First Amendment protections in the Hobby Lobby case, the court sought to enforce the terms of RFRA. How does the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protect religious liberty? Under RFRA, if a law substantially burdens someone’s religious practice, the government must prove that the burden is necessary to advance a compelling government interest. The government must also prove that its pursuit of that compelling interest is being undertaken by using the “least restrictive means.” In its Hobby Lobby ruling, the high court found that the government had failed to demonstrate that the ACA’s contraception mandate was the least restrictive means (meaning least burdensome to religious practice) of achieving its goal of providing cost-free access to female employees to the full range of contraceptive methods.