Mark Silk is paying close attention to every twist and turn in the legal arguments surrounding contraception coverage and the Affordable Care Act so you don’t have to. In his latest dispatch he writes:
Last week the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals gave Hobby Lobby the go-ahead to challenge the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. In due course, the Supreme Court may well decide that the federal government cannot require for-profit companies to provide such coverage against their asserted religious principles. ….
The long and the short of it is that, in the relatively near future, Hobby Lobby and other such companies may be entitled to withhold contraception coverage under the ACA, but not be entitled to withhold it in states that require the coverage — currently 28 of them. Religious freedom would thus mean one thing federally and another thing in the states.