After yet another conversation with a friend debating whether Hobby Lobby marks a "downtrend in women's rights," I crafted the following Hobby Lobby thought experiment:
Imagine that a Republican Congress passes a law that requires home insurance companies to reimburse any homeowner who chooses to purchase a handgun for purposes of home self-defense. Congress reasons in the legislative history (rightly or wrongly) that this rule will reduce the incidence of home invasions, with resulting reverbations for the national economy. At the same time, there exists a small, local home insurance company that has enshrined in its corporate charter its founders' religious principles of strict non-violence. When the law is passed, this local insurer files a RFRA claim in federal district court, claiming that its religious liberty is violated because the law forces it to do that which violates its religious principles: Provide free guns to the public.
If the Supreme Court later struck down the federal free-handguns-for-homeowners mandate as applied to conscientious religious objectors, would anybody be claiming that Americans' right to own guns was on a "downtrend"?
I think not. Well, perhaps certain extreme right-wing groups would make a stink about this. But they would be as drastically wrong as the Supreme Court's current naysayers, who claim that Hobby Lobby has anything to do with women's rights.
(Note: The insurance company in my thought experiment is in a slightly different posture than Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods (who were not insurers but companies compelled by statute to offer the offensive insurance), but that hardly matters.)
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