Gabriel Arana warns that a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the defendant in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby could have the same effect as the Arizona bill Jan Brewer vetoed last week, but nationwide:
It’s easy to see how a win for social conservatives in Hobby Lobby could sanction the same sort of discrimination as the Arizona law. If a for-profit employer is allowed to opt out of the contraception mandate, it stands to reason that refusing to extend health benefits to gay couples would also be protected. “It’s a slippery slope,” [director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress Sally] Steenland says. … Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby is poised to become the Citizens United of the culture wars. In fact, the question at the heart of the case bears a striking resemblance to the one the justices considered in Citizens: Do corporations have freedom-of-religion rights? If the Supreme Court finds that they do, then religious owners and employees of for-profit corporations have pretty good grounds for refusing to cover treatment for HIV or any health care related to the pregnancy of an unwed mother.
Ian Millhiser shares that concern:
Denying birth control to your workers because of your own religious objections to it superimposes your own personal beliefs about conscience and faith onto your employees. So does refusing to serve a gay person due to a religious objection to their sexual orientation. If the Supreme Court winds up holding that one person’s faith can impose itself on another, which is exactly what the plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood want them to do, then all the nightmare scenarios imagined in the debate over the Arizona bill could become very real — at least at the federal level. Indeed, it is even possible that business owners who object to serving African Americans on religious grounds could challenge a 1983 Supreme Court decision holding that religious beliefs cannot justify racist discrimination.
But John McCormack suggests that neither the Arizona bill nor the Hobby Lobby case would grant for-profit businesses new rights:
“The irony about the Arizona law is that I actually think the law was quite unnecessary. But it certainly wasn’t dangerous,” Stanford law professor Michael W. McConnell told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “I don’t know anything about politics in Arizona or why the legislature voted for it, but there was no pressing legal need for it.”
The Dish 