It seemed to me from the beginning that being made to pay for something that someone views as deeply morally wrong (or to facilitate the transaction for same, if you take the general view that employee health insurance ultimately comes out of employee wages) was going to be a giant burden on people of conscience. And because the loss to women was small, it seemed fairly obvious to me that we should grant the freedom of conscience to people who clearly have some very deeply held beliefs — not because women’s health is not very important, but because this was not going to have a very important impact on women’s health.
And yet the logic of politics, and the culture war, made this sort of fine distinction-drawing impossible. As I see it, this case should never have made it to the court; the Barack Obama administration should have pre-empted the issue by quietly allowing exemptions for nonprofits and closely held corporations that had clear and deep religious beliefs that existed outside of the desire not to pay for contraception. (Hobby Lobby, for example, is closed on Sundays in observation of the Sabbath, even though this costs them sales; I think we can all agree that the Little Sisters of the Poor have demonstrated a fair amount of commitment to demanding religious principles.)
Instead, the administration chose to pick this fight — and got a definitive ruling that will probably have much broader impacts than quiet exceptions. Nor is this surprising; it was pretty predictable from earlier rulings like Citizens United, in which the court also held that people don’t lose their First Amendment rights simply because they have come together in a group or legally organized that group as a corporation.
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