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: But the appeals court could order the government to find an accommodation to ensure that Autocam’s workers can still receive the full range of cost-free contraceptives under the ACA. Such an accommodation would involve either the government or an insurance provider paying for religiously-objectionable contraceptive services. What was the basis for the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision? The majority justices declared that Americans have a right to hold religious beliefs and to not be forced by the government to act in ways that violate those beliefs. Under the ACA’s contraception mandate, the owners of Hobby Lobby were forced into a dilemma – either fund the objectionable contraception methods and violate their religious beliefs or pay up to $475 million in penalties and remain faithful to their beliefs. Five members of the nine-member court agreed that the mandate went too far. Four dissenting justices said the mandate was not coercive of religious beliefs because it only required the religious owners to support a health insurance program. Since it would be up to each employee to decide which services to choose, the owners’ part in that choice was too attenuated to trigger any religious protections. Did the First Amendment ’s guarantee of free exercise of religion apply in the Hobby Lobby case? No.