"Whatever else it is, Hobby Lobby ruling isn’t narrow"

Good to talk to Steve Sebelius for this one. 

“I really don’t view this as narrow, by any stretch of the imagination,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “It makes ‘sincere religious objection’ a much stronger argument in areas that, quite frankly, we’re not even thinking about.”

Indeed, Levinson said we might have to wait another 20 years to find out precisely how broad Monday’s ruling really is, as corporations object to other laws and regulations on religious grounds.

Most troubling, Winkler and Levinson said, is the fact that while justices said laws against racial discrimination would probably withstand an attack on religious grounds, they left unmentioned laws prohibiting discrimination against gays, lesbians and transgender people. And it’s much more likely that a corporation would seek religiously based exemption from laws covering anti-gay discrimination than they would laws protecting racial minorities.

We’ll wrestle with that question, and perhaps many, many more, because Congress decided it could not leave undisturbed a perfectly reasonable set of Supreme Court precedents. Let no one ever say that pandering does not have consequences.