Well, we knew this was coming. Corporations are not only people, they have religions, and their right to practice that religion trumps the rights of their employees.
Except, maybe not.
When I was in law school I learned, or thought I learned, that when a court, particularly an appellate court, ruled on a case, it was implicitly ruling on like cases as well; i.e., offering guidances to other courts as to how a similar case should be decided. But that was jurisprudence from the 20th, 19th, 18th, 17th, 16, 15th, 14th, 13th, 12th, and 11th century. Times have changed.
Some might have thought that Bush v. Gore was an anomaly. In that case, you will recall, the court announced a new rule of 14th Amendment jurisprudence, but hastened to add that it only applied in the case at hand, and no one should presume that the rationale of the decision should ever be applied in any other case. (The truth is that the lawless decision in Bush v. Gore might, if followed in other contexts, have led to decisions with which our right wing genetic relatives would be distinctly uncomfortable.) But the new jurisprudence is now firmly embedded (to the extent anything can be considered embedded in the context of a court that lacks all intellectual honesty), for how else can one interpret this quote, culled from the Hobby Lobby decision:
This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to mean that all insurance mandates, that is for blood transfusions or vaccinations, necessarily fail if they conflict with an employer's religious beliefs.
No indeed, for there is a distinction between contraceptives and vaccinations, in that men get vaccinations. I haven't read the entire decision, but I'm morally certain that the five male authors would go on to explain that the courts must distinguish between medical devices and procedures that the state has a compelling interest in fostering, and those in which its interest is less than compelling. It just so happens that the only medical procedures or devices that are less than compelling are those that primarily affect women. Funny about that.
But, perhaps I am wrong. In the interests of total fairness, I would venture to say that if the proper case came along, even this Supreme Court would feel the need to be somewhat consistent, so if any religiously inclined employer feels compelled to deprive its male employees of Viagra, the five flaccid old men on the court would probably reluctantly allow it. After all, they have government provided insurance, so, like their other rulings (think buffer zones around abortion clinics and around the Supreme Court) it won't affect them.
Oh, wait, after writing this, I see I was wrong about something. The court did find that the government had a compelling interest in providing contraceptive coverage, it just wasn't compelling enough.
