First Assault, First Amendment, First Principles

From The Washington Examiner:

Democrats are crowing about a second Obama
term, and the Left’s culture-war troops are emboldened by their
trouncing of social conservatives. Religious conservatives need to plant
their spears and brace for the coming federal assault on religious
liberty.

The Obama administration this month, in
defending its health plan’s contraception mandate, articulated a narrow
view of the First Amendment’s religious liberty protections.

The First Amendment states that “Congress
shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. Should
government be allowed to force ordinary people to violate the moral
laws to which they subscribe?

David Green says no. Green and his family own
Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts-and-crafts stores. They sued the
administration on the grounds the contraception mandate prohibited their
free exercise of Christianity by forcing them to pay for abortifacient
morning-after pills.

The Greens weren’t arguing that morning-after
pills should be illegal. They weren’t even trying to keep their
employees from using them. They just didn’t want to implicate themselves
in what they saw as immoral activity.

The administration responded with an
unsettling argument: The Greens aren’t protected by the First
Amendment’s “free exercise” clause in this case because they operate a
secular business.