In a free society, employers would be at liberty to offer their employees group health insurance, if they wished, and to offer whatever coverage they wished to offer. In the Supreme Court today, however, so basic a premise barely surfaced during oral argument in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, the Obamacare “contraceptive mandate” case. Rather, Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg, clearly supporting the mandate, pressed Hobby Lobby’s attorney Paul Clement as to whether an “exception” should be provided for religious employers who are otherwise required by regulation to offer contraceptive coverage, and whether such an exception could be limited or instead would have no principled bounds. By contrast, Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kennedy, and even Justice Breyer were at pains to show how such a religious “accommodation” could in fact be limited.
Thus have we come to a point at which religious liberty is recognized, if it is, as an exception to the general rule that government may require us to act as it dictates—and we have to be careful not to extend that accommodation too far lest it gobble up the rule.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/religious-liberty-exception-government-rule
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