Chris Christie on Hobby Lobby: "Who Knows?"

Weak:

"The fact is that when you're an executive, your Supreme Court makes a ruling and you've got to live with it unless you can get the legislative body to change the law or change the Constitution. The point is: Why should I give an opinion as to whether they were right or wrong? At the end of the day, they did what they did. That's now the law of the land," he said.

Meanwhile, Matt Bowman of NRO notes that Hobby Lobby is not, despite some conservatives' claim to the contrary, only about the four types of birth control admitted by HHS to be possible abortifacients. Those were the specific types of birth control Hobby Lobby objected to paying for, but Catholics, for example, will object to a larger swath of birth control methods:

[T]he Supreme Court’s protections for religious freedom apply to those who object to all of the HHS Mandate, not just to those who object to some of it.

This is clear for several reasons. First, as I noted previously, the Supreme Court issued several orders Tuesday morning after ruling on Hobby Lobby, in which it upheld rulings in favor of other families and vacated rulings adverse to other families challenging this mandate. But all of those families happened to be Catholic, and they objected to any abortifacient, sterilization, or birth-control coverage.

Second, the Hobby Lobby ruling itself is not limited to objection only to certain abortifacient drugs and devices. In fact, in the "substantial burden" discussion of the ruling, it tells the government that it cannot parse a religious objector's beliefs.

Third, when the Court says the mandate fails the "least restrictive means" test, it points to the fact that the government is providing exemptions and different arrangements for other entities. But those exemptions and other arrangements include health plans that object to the entire HHS mandate, not just to parts of it.

...

Thus there’s no reason to interpret the Supreme Court’s ruling as only protecting objections to a few items considered to be abortifacients.

And meanwhile, the left is now writing songs about the Battle of Hobby Lobby.

As well as just generally behaving like prats (at the link).

posted by Ace at 06:04 PM

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