religious groups if they had a compelling state interest and if they could demonstrate their least restrictive means, the only way they could achieve this aim, was dealing with not a central part of an individual s religion. it was a curious compromise that led sandra day o connor every time to be voting in favor of stet regulation. the smith case was really scalia s solution. he turned the clock back to the secular regulation rule and allowed for exceptions. that s what we re talking about now, the hobby lobby case, more a question in the larger sense of where individual religious based corporations can have an ala cart menu approach to this regulation. when o connor saw scalia unraveling her test, she wrote a note to hairy blackman as she was listening to scalia s bench statement and said, harry, it
court. the biggest one or at least the highest profile one is arguably the hobby lobby case, a case that will decide whether companies can opt out of providing birth control in the health plans they offer employees. doing that is a mandate of the affordable care act. but hobby lobby has joined with catholic charities and others to argue they should be exempted as a corporation on religious grounds. here to talk about that and some of the other big cases that we expect to get decisions on in the coming days, i m joined from richmond by dahlia lith wick, legal correspondent for slate. we also have erin car moan reporter for msnbc.com. she s been following the hobby lobby case very closely. erin, bring us up to speed, how do you see the decision coming down in this hobby lobby case? the backdrop is the contraceptive benefit which many millions of women have already enjoyed as part of their paid
religious freedom rights under the religious freedom restoration act? they say this is not a burden, if the government doesn t require you do provide health insurance, it s not a burden. or they could open up the door for companies saying i don t want to comply with all kinds of laws because they violate the boss s religious freedom. we could see women who work for those companies in particular because women s health care is so controversial, having a different set of earned benefits than people elsewhere. dahlia, what do you make of that? what s your take on this case? is irin right, that they could potentially open the door to not just corporations like hobby lobby denying women contraception, but denying anything they think is against their religion? everything that irin said i agree with. i think one possibility, and you could see this playing out in oral argument is the court tries to figure some narrower way to constrain this ruling so it doesn t on the one hand force corpora
violation of their first amendment rights. big stakes. mother jones recently put it, will the supreme court kill public employee unions? is that a possibility in this case, dahlia? again, there s probably going to be a way, if the court decides not to do the most dramatic thing it can do, to find a sort of thread the needle here and do something in this case that will only relate to not every single public sector union in the country, but only home health care workers which is what issue here in illinois. but they can. certainly i think it s fair to say there were four votes it looked like that wanted to go really big in this case, and really, really, i think in some ways gut the powers of public sector unions. ironically in this case the fifth vote is going to be justice scalia. he s going to be the deciding vote in this case. and whether or not this case really turns into a profound,
religious conscience, and on the other hand as irin said, open the flood gates to religious corporation owners imposing all kinds of religious constraints on their employees regardless of their xleer s religious beliefs. i think we re trying to find some middle way. chief justice roberts talked a little bit, could we make this specific to the green family who owned hobby lobby because it s a family held, closely held corporation? if they re trying to go small, they may do that. if they go big, the consequences in either direction are huge. dahlia, to me my head spins when i hear you or anybody else talking about this case, talking about the corporation s religion. have we ever in supreme court history, have we had previous cases in which a corporation was recognized to have a right to religion? this case comes up under the religious freedom restoration