The issue is raised by three corporations’ challenges to Obamacare, specifically its requirement that employer health plans cover a wide range of contraceptives. The companies’ owners maintain that the rule infringes on their enterprises’ free expression of religion. Lower courts have split on whether a federal law forbidding the government to “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” applies to corporations. If it does, the road is wide open for employers to allow their religious beliefs to govern how they do business. Two appellate courts have ruled that for-profit corporations don’t have religious rights and a third says they might; what this split means is that the issue is on a certain path to the Supreme Court.

The implications of granting corporations the right to free expression of religion are horrific. The precedent, writes David H. Gans of the Constitutional Accountability Center, would allow companies to fire workers “for engaging in all manner of activities that may not conform to the religious code of the company’s owners, including using contraceptives or terminating a pregnancy, becoming pregnant out of wedlock, or marrying a person of the same sex.”

The plaintiffs in the three cases are all business-owning families — the Protestant Greens of Oklahoma, owners of the Hobby Lobby retail chain; the Hahns of Pennsylvania, Mennonite owners of a cabinet firm named Conestoga Wood; and the Roman Catholic Kennedys of Michigan, owners of the industrial manufacturing concern Autocam. They say their businesses are extensions of their religious lives, and therefore, forcing them to pay for contraceptive coverage for their workers violates the companies’ free exercise of religion.

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