The Hobby Lobby decision is much more sweeping than conservative media are portraying. Here's how: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/01/fox-news-ignores-current-legal-challenges-that/199960
Fox is ignoring the fact that companies are challenging all 20 contraceptives covered under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and that one way the conservative majority suggested the government could bridge the gap in coverage -- providing the same opt-out accommodation to for-profits that it provides to religiously-affiliated non-profits -- is already being challenged in the lower courts.
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The idea that the ruling in Hobby Lobby is somehow contained to the facts presented -- and the four contraceptives Hobby Lobby originally challenged -- is misleading. As the Associated Press reported the day after the decision, a flurry of subsequent Supreme Court orders "confirmed that its decision a day earlier extending religious rights to closely held corporations applies broadly to the contraceptive coverage requirement in the new health care law, not just the handful of methods the justices considered in their ruling." These orders, sending cases involving companies challenging all 20 contraceptive methods -- not just the Hobby Lobby ones -- back down for reconsideration, "sent a fairly strong signal on Tuesday that its ruling giving some for-profit businesses a right not to provide birth control services to their female workers goes beyond the specific methods at issue in that decision," in the words of legal expert Lyle Denniston.
Further, although the conservative majority claimed its holding applied only to "closely held" corporations, it failed to note that over 90 percent of corporations are defined as closely held, and not all closely held corporation are mom-and-pop shops -- including Hobby Lobby, which employs thousands of people and operates over 600 stores. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, "as Hobby Lobby's case demonstrates, such claims are indeed pursued by large corporations, employing thousands of persons of different faiths, whose ownership is not diffuse. 'Closely held' is not synonymous with 'small.'" Ginsburg went on to note that "Hobby Lobby is hardly the only enterprise of sizable scale that is family owned or closely held. For example, the family-owned candy giant Mars, Inc., takes in $33 billion in revenues and has some 72,000 employees, and closely held Cargill, Inc., takes in more than $136 billion in revenues and employs some 140,000 persons." Other corporate law experts seconded Ginsburg's warning that the majority's newfound corporate religion could be used by all companies, closely held or no.
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