The Legacy of the Hobby Lobby Case: Protecting Anti-Gay Discrimination?

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In his majority opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took pains to frame the ruling, exempting companies from complying with Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate if it violated the religious beliefs of their owners, as a narrow one. But gay and civil rights groups have long warned that a decision permitting such a religious exemption could have broad ramifications, potentially allowing employers to discriminate against gays. Now, their fears may be coming to pass.

“What we’ve seen since last week’s decision came down is that opponents of LGBT equality have pushed a misreading of that decision as having broadly endorsed discrimination against people, including LGBT people in the workplace,” says Ian Thompson, a legislative representative for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told Mother Jones that the Hobby Lobby ruling “opens the door for corporations to discriminate against anyone that doesn’t look, sound, or share the religious beliefs that they do. This isn’t a business agenda; it’s an extreme social agenda and it is deeply unpopular with the American people.”