Obamacare birth control mandate lawsuit: How a radical argument went mainstream.

It's hard to wrap one's head around the fact that the fight for "birth control" which we thought had been won is now at the center of the latest of the hydra-headed attacks on "Obamacare".  The intellectual weakness on the left is that ACLU-types - having honed their First Amendment absolutism - are unable to see that the relevant burden is not the business owners who adhere to the Catholic Church's regressive insistence that artificial birth control is sinful.  The correct focus is the right of employees to exercise their rights - to choose contraception, rather than be pregnant. - GWC

Obamacare birth control mandate lawsuit: How a radical argument went mainstream.:

The Supreme Court just agreed to hear a case challenging the requirement that most employers provide contraceptive coverage in their employee health insurance plans. On the front page of Monday’s paper, the New York Times previewed one of the two cases the justices have agreed to hear: Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. At issue is whether for-profit corporations can have rights of religious conscience.

Surprisingly, the Times’ coverage was badly lopsided in favor of the rights of corporations. Constitutional arguments that were only recently considered “off the wall” are apparently moving into the mainstream media. We saw this process at work during the last legal challenge to Obamacare, when unprecedented arguments from conservatives eventually came to be accepted by many justices on the Supreme Court. It could be happening again, and it all begins when serious newspapers accept flawed legal arguments uncritically.

The precise question before the court is whether for-profit corporations can claim a religious freedom exception to the contraception mandate—the requirement under Obamacare that employers offer contraception coverage as part of health insurance for their employees. Exceptions already exist for religious organizations, for certain religiously affiliated nonprofits, for grandfathered employers, and for profit-seeking corporations with fewer than 50 employees. But no such exception exists for large companies. As a result, some corporations controlled by owners with religious objections to contraception have sued, contending that religious freedom laws exempt them from the contraception mandate

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