Far-right groups are salivating that the prospects for taking birth control away from as many women as possible now that the first case,
Hobby Lobby has been decided in their favor. They're
looking ahead to the cases already in the works on their way to the Court, and are quite pleased.
"I hope it's a harbinger of good things, an indicator that people of good faith like the Greens and the Hahns can and should stand up for what the believe in," Chuck Hurley, vice president and chief counsel for The Family Leader, told CBS News.
He doesn't have to hope. He's got five Supreme Court justices who put more stock in belief than in science. After this ruling, it's hard to doubt that they'll side with religious non-profits the next time around, who say that the exemption they received from the administration to the contraceptive mandate—an exemption granted in a misguided attempt to appease the bastards—isn't enough. They say that merely signing a piece of paper to attest that they qualify for the exemption is a religious burden.
Several nonprofits—such as the Colorado order of nuns the Little Sisters of the Poor—say this accommodation doesn't settle their concerns. […] The Little Sisters' case, along with several others, are currently in various courts of appeal. Federal appeals courts have already rejected challenges from two nonprofits —the Michigan Catholic Conference and Catholic Family Services, and the University of Notre Dame—meaning the Supreme Court could take up the nonprofits' case as early as its next term.
Kevin Walsh, associate professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law who is serving as continuing counselor to the Little Sisters of the Poor, told CBS News that the Hobby Lobby ruling is "a promising decision for [nonprofit] challengers."
In fact, in another stunningly bad part of the overall awful opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the accommodation for religious non-profits is a possible alternative for the administration in the case of for-profits: "HHS itself has demonstrated that it has at its disposal an approach that is less restrictive than requiring employers to fund contraceptive methods that violate their religious beliefs." It's almost as if Alito didn't know that this very approach has been challenged. But you can be sure that if the administration tries to expand it to for-profits, Alito will be there to slap it down somehow in a Little Sisters ruling, or in one of the
82 pending challenges to this mandate that will eventually find its way to the Court.
Those 82 challenges, brought by both for-profit and non-profit employers, represent a hell of a lot of female employees. The War on Women has barely gotten started.