Tweets Of The Day

It appears, according to McKay Coppins, that Bobby Jindal is ready to ride the Hobby Lobby horse into the primaries, in Kilgore’s eyes, “becoming the champion of dispossessed theocrats rebranded as victims of persecution”:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and a longtime Jindal ally, praised him as one of the few prospective 2016 candidates with an unimpeachable record on social issues, and a personal life that exemplifies conservative religious values. As an example, Perkins noted that Jindal and his wife, Supriya, were the first couple in the country to enter into a “covenant marriage,” a special sort of legal union designed by Perkins in Louisiana when he was a state lawmaker that makes divorce more difficult. “His foundation [is] really centered on his Christian faith,” Perkins said. “Talk is cheap, but the walk is where you find the worth of an individual. And he is walking.”

Sprinting, I’d say.

Update from a reader, who spells out something that casual readers might have missed:

You might want to clarify in your post on the Jindal tweets that he is dead wrong about this being a First Amendment issue.

As you have covered before, the case was explicitly decided under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which was enacted precisely because the Supreme Court held in Smith that the First Amendment does not cover situations like this.  The Hobby Lobby decision is not based on the First Amendment. From the last paragraph of Justice Alito’s opinion:

The contraceptive mandate, as applied to closely held corporations, violates RFRA. Our decision on that statutory question makes it unnecessary to reach the First Amendment claim raised by Conestoga and the Hahns.

Or, as Justice Ginsburg put it in her dissent:

The Court does not pretend that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause demands religion-based accommodations so extreme, for our decisions leave no doubt on that score. See infra, at 6–8. Instead, the Court holds that Congress, in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), 42 U. S. C. §2000bb et seq., dictated the extraordinary religion-based exemptions today’s decision endorses.