Hobby Lobby

I just returned from a trip to the Bay Area, and I have not had much time to read up on the Hobby Lobby case that the Supreme Court ruled on yesterday.  When I read something interesting–and corrective (there is so much wrong about the commentary on the case)–on the Internet, I’ll post it here.

Here’s one from Ann Althouse for starters. Key quote:

When we arrived at our destination, one of the first things I saw was a TV tuned to MSNBC and a news head was interviewing the president of NARAL who was delivering talking points that, every few seconds, misstated what was in the case. I glance around the internet in my usual way and see the chatter about the case and get the nagging feeling that everyone on the internet [sic] is getting things wrong . . . 

Here’s Althouse again, in an earlier post about some misguided Huffington Post commentary:

HuffPo doesn’t bother to mention that the case is based on a federal statute — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — which Congress could amend and to which Congress could have put an exception in the Affordable Care Act.  Except that Congress couldn’t do any of those things, and the contraceptive mandate wasn’t even something Congress put in the ACA, because Congress only just barely passed the ACA, and an exception from the need to provide religious exemptions would have made the ACA less politically viable, not more.

And here she is again on the corporations as persons bruhah:

I have a corporations are people tag for a reason. Remember when Romney said those words? Much more at the tag. This is a discourse I have been following. The haters of Citizens United love to mock this idea, and it may have seemed especially mockable in the context of religion. (Can a corporation pray?!!)

For a change of pace, here’s Sasha Volokh from the Volokh Conspiracy. He teaches law at Emery University and thinks the case was rightly decided under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act but also questions the  constitutionality of RFRA.

I should mention that I’m not wild about RFRA in the first place. It’s true that RFRA passed unanimously in the House and nearly unanimously in the Senate — in 1993, when Congress was controlled by Democrats — and was signed by Bill Clinton, and everyone now on the Court seems to accept the constitutionality of RFRA . . .

Here’s a pretty good discussion of the case from Emma Green at The Atlantic. She’s a non-lawyer as far as I can tell. Once again, a key quote:

[A]s John J. Dilulio Jr., the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, writes over at Brookings, “Love it or loathe it, the Hobby Lobby decision is limited in scope.” It’s about how the Religious Freedom Restoration Act applies to this particular objection from Hobby Lobby and other “closely held” companies, or businesses that are mostly owned by a small group of people who also happen to run them. And the Court went out of its way to clarify that their ruling does not apply to other possible medical objections, like blood transfusions and vaccinations. 

More to come.