USA Today said that the US Supreme Court was clearly divided during a hearing regarding the latest challenge of The Obama administration's fledgling health-care system. The hearing was to decide whether the petitioning businesses will be allowed to not offer birth-control coverage for its employees on the basis that the firms have the right to exercise their religious faith.
The online news outlet said the contraceptive mandate became a hot court topic after Affordable Care Act caused an uproar in deeply devouted business entrepreneurs. Courts saw over a hundred civil lawsuits across the country, of which 78 are currently pending. For the Hobby Lobby case, which is among the two plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, over 80 third-party groups had submitted their briefs to the US' highest court.
Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who is the US government's lawyer in the case, argued that the religious controversy surrounding the contraceptive mandate is enough to grant an exception in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. USA Today said the three female Supreme Court judges reacted to Verrilli's statement, with Justice Elena Kagan commenting that granting an exception will no longer make the implementation of the contraceptive mandate uniform.
The liberal bloc also questioned the impact of granting such exemption on other for-profit companies who wish to seek such exemption, female workers who will be burdened by such exemption. Moreover, the liberal bloc thought that by granting the exemption, it might give other companies a workaround to not comply with the healthcare law, USA Today said.
On the other hand, the conservative bloc in the Supreme Court countered that the government could always provide the contraceptives directly to female workers of for-profit companies who do not wish to comply with the contraceptive mandate. Moreover, the group said that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act has always accorded for-profit companies to make a religious claim against laws that they belief violated their beliefs.
