One Last Attempt At Clarification for Hobby Lobby

The most interesting twist in the discussions that followed the Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case are those in which the liberals complain about individuals using their religion and the Constitution as a means to disobey federal law.  If you listened to any of the commentary, you surely heard the pundits chattering away about this.  But these comments are based on erroneous assumptions.  The Hobby Lobby case did not get decided on the basis of the Constitution.  The Supreme Court did NOT say that Congress could not pass a law that required employers to include all sorts of birth control methods in the health insurance packages provided to employees.  This is a critical point.  If the Court had decided that the First Amendment allowed any American to refuse to provide birth control in health insurance for employees just because the employer had religious objections to doing so, then it would have struck down the Obamacare laws and regulations that required such birth control methods to be furnished.  That's not what the Court did.  Nope, the Supreme Court decided the Hobby Lobby case on the basis of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act or RFRA.  That law was passed by a Democrat House and a Democrat Senate and signed into law by Bill Clinton.  Harry Reid voted for it.  Chuck Schumer was the sponsor of the Act.  In other words, it was the Democrats who put it in place.  RFRA requires the federal government to respect the religious views of persons in this country.  RFRA says that the feds cannot force someone to do something that is against his or her religious beliefs if there is a less restrictive way to accomplish the government's goals.  That's why the Supreme Court decided the Hobby Lobby case the way it did.  The majority said that there was a much less restrictive way to get birth control to the employees in question.  Indeed, the Court noted that the federal government used just such a less restrictive method to get birth control coverage for employees of religious institutions.  The employees got the birth control coverage, but the religious institutions do not have to provide it.

When you put all this together, what you find is that the liberal wing of the Democrats all voted for a law which had the obvious effect of limiting how the Obamacare birth control coverage mandate works with regard to those who are religious.  It was not the Constitution; it was the Democrats' own law.  No wonder the Dems keep trying to change the focus.  If the Democrat base ever realized that the cause of the Hobby Lobby decision was a law pushed by the Democrats, I doubt they would be too happy about it.