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In the aftermath, the Court vacated several similar cases and sent them back to lower courts to make rulings based on the Hobby Lobby ruling. The court also provided an injunction to Wheaton College to protect it from penalties for refusing to offer contraception.

Given the outrage coming from the Left, you’d think Obamacare was repealed. Far from it. All 2,700 pages remain. Faith trumped the law on just one provision.
The court’s decision has an interesting stipulation.

According to Politico Pro, companies can’t just stop contraception coverage. They must go to court to obtain an exemption. But Daniel Blomberg, an attorney at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty who represented Hobby Lobby, says the ruling makes getting the exemption easy. He notes that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act “only applies to the people who assert it.” So employers will be required to register their religious objections with government one by one.

To understand why the case was based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and not directly on the First Amendment, you have to understand a long line of Free Exercise Clause case law. To summarize briefly, everyone recognizes that "it's against my religion" can't be a universal excuse for violating the law; otherwise, Rastafarians could legally smoke marijuana, Quakers could refuse to pay taxes because their tax money funds the Army, and Moloch-worshipers could perform human sacrifices.

There have been two schools of thought in modern SCOTUS decisions as to where to draw the line: one doctrine, which originated with an opinion by Justice Brennan during the Warren Court era, said that the Government can force someone to violate their religious beliefs only if it has a "compelling governmental interest" in doing so (e.g., preventing murder or funding the Army) and the law used the "least restrictive means" of serving that interest.

Later, in the 1990s, a majority of the Court (ironically, led by Justice Scalia) overruled the Brennan test and said the Government could force someone to violate their religion as long as the law was "generally applicable" and didn't single out any particular religion for discrimination. Under that view, the Contraception Mandate would be constitutional. (That case involved Native Americans who used peyote in religious rituals; the Court's liberals said they had a First Amendment right to do so, but the conservative majority held against them.)

Congress was unhappy with Scalia's view, and reinstated the Brennan test by statute in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (passed unanimously by the Houses and 97-3 by the Senate-- neither liberals nor conservatives liked Scalia's test).

Thus, the issue in this case was not whether the Contraception Mandate was constitutional, but whether it violated the RFRA. The majority said that there may be a compelling interest in guaranteeing women birth control, but Congress can achieve that goal by a less restrictive means (e.g., having the Government pay for it directly.)

Doing her coitus-interruptus routine, Sandra Fluke spoke out about the awful "war on womyn." BTW, there's still a reward out for anyone who can come up w/ the name of one man who had sex w/ Sandra.

Course, I was particularly pleased when Texas Democrat, and abortion worshipper, Wendy Davis entered the fray.

In true Texas-style, Wendy assertively warned guys what could happen if they dared approach womyn w/ an unsheathed penis.

The whole thing is a colossal case of misdirection by the media (not just the liberal media, either) anyway. Hobby Lobby DOES pay for contraceptives through their insurance plan. What they went to court over was morning-after pills and the like. Four things out of the 20 mandated things is what this case was about. The other 16 of 20 on the list they do pay for, and have been paying for since before the case was filed.

I think both conservative and liberal media have blown this whole case out of proportion. Should be a fairly common-sense thing that if a woman needs a morning-after pill often enough to need insurance to pay for it, she’s doing something wrong. OTOH, this case was NEVER about normal, everyday birth control used to prevent unwanted pregancies, including sterilization surgeries. But the headlines don’t tell you that. Much easier to get more ratings and more hits by making mountains out of molehills.