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" Well, the day began with Jeffrey Rosen&amp;#039;s scaring the fking daylights out of me. Although there are technical differences between the two cases [Hobby Lobby and Conestega Woods], both will force the justices to confront the future balance between the First Amendment on one hand and anti-discrimination laws on the other. In particular, the justices will have to decide whether the logic of Citizens United-that individuals who organize themselves as for-profit corporations have the same First Amendment rights as natural persons-includes rights of religious freedom as well as free speech. The justices may find narrower grounds to decide all three cases, but taken to their logical conclusion, the claims of the religious business owners in all of them would mean the end of anti-discrimination laws as we know them. Well, OK, then. So far, however, the dispatches from inside The Hallowed Chambers seem to indicate several things. Point The First: The ladies of the ensemble apparently went completely to town on Paul Clement, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, and his religious liberty bamboozlement. The most forceful was Justice Elena Kagan, who repeatedly asked aggressive questions throughout the 90-minute argument about the legal dangers of exempting certain entities from laws on the basis of religion. &amp;quot;There are quite a number of medical treatments that religious groups object to,&amp;quot; she said, positing that a ruling against the Obama administration could empower business owners to seek exemptions from laws about sex discrimination, family leave and the minimum wage. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;d see religious objectors come out of the woodwork,&amp;quot; Kagan warned, arguing that it&amp;#039;s problematic for judges to test the centrality of a belief to a religion or the sincerity of beliefs that are invoked in court. Apparently, Clement&amp;#039;s rejoinder was something to the effect that every crazy-assed appeal to &amp;quot;religious liberty&amp;quot; would have to be judged on its own merits. In other words, if a left-leaning company decided not to pay its corporate taxes because its owners were Quakers and opposed to paying for weapons of war, it would be on its own. Paul Clement would be on another line, in a meeting, or helping other customers. Point The Second: It appears that, as in so many other things, everything will depend on Justice Anthony (Weathervane) Kennedy. This, according to Think Progress&amp;#039;s Ian Millhiser, is a very bad thing. Nevertheless, he looked at the government&amp;#039;s requirement to provide birth control coverage and envisioned a future law compelling Hobby Lobby to pay for actual abortions - just as he once gazed upon a requirement to buy health insurance and imagined the government forcing everyone to buy broccoli. In Justice Kennedy&amp;#039;s Courtroom, the government doesn&amp;#039;t have to defend the law it actually passed, it has to defend the worst law Kennedy can imagine them passing - even if that law would never make it through Congress. Clement pounced on the opening Kennedy gave him the second he took the podium for his rebuttal argument. The government&amp;#039;s position, he claimed, goes straight to abortion and &amp;quot;that cannot be what Congress meant when it passed RFRA.&amp;quot; Kagan&amp;#039;s face grew even more worried. Point The Last: Splitting The Difference. If there&amp;#039;s any consensus to the reports at all, it is that the court is split, and that the door is open fo the court to middle the issue -- essentially, the court could decide that a company has the right to make a &amp;quot;religious liberty&amp;quot; claim, but that the contraception provision under discussion isn&amp;#039;t a valid one. They also could limit what is considered a corporation under this case. The whole thing is a depressing reminder that almost the entire debate over the role of religion in our politics is conducted, in one way or the other, on the grounds of human sexuality. In this, alas, and especially in this case, because it involves a woman&amp;#039;s right to control her reproductive health and the role of birth control therein, the political brawl is a precise parallel to what happened among Roman Catholics in the aftermath of Paul VI&amp;#039;s dreadful Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968. Suddenly, the whole question of papal authority, and the magisterium, and the deposit of faith, and almost the entirety of Catholic doctrine pivoted vitally on the question of birth control. The Church went mad over it, and it hasn&amp;#039;t recovered from it yet. In Bare Ruined Choirs, historian Garry Wills best summed up the situation in a way that resounded through the arguments raised in the Hallowed Chambers today. &amp;quot;Thus are the &amp;#039;keys to the Kingdom&amp;#039; reduced to mere smithying of intellectual chastity belts.&amp;quot; And thus, today, in the Supreme Court, was the First Amendment to the Constitution reduced to exactly the same thing. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a27986/hobby-lobby-case-032514/>