Hasta La Gadget!

A divided Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Monday that closely held corporations cannot be required to provide contraception coverage for their employees.

In an opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Burwell that the Obama administration has failed to show that the contraception mandate contained in the Affordable Care Act is the “least restrictive means of advancing its interest” in providing birth control at no cost to women.

The opinion was written narrowly so as only to apply to the contraception mandate, not to religious employers who object to other medical services, like blood transfusions or vaccines.

The Affordable Care Act contains a provision requiring most employers to cover the full range of contraception in their health care plans at no cost to their female employees. The Obama administration had granted an exemption for churches and accommodations for religious hospitals, schools and nonprofits, but for-profit companies were required to comply with the coverage rule or pay fines.

Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned craft supply chain store, and Conestoga Wood Specialties Store, a Pennsylvania wood manufacturer owned by a family of Mennonites, challenged the contraception mandate on the grounds that it violates their religious freedom by requiring them to pay for methods of contraception they find morally objectionable. The owners of those companies believe some forms of birth control — emergency contraception and intrauterine devices — are forms of abortion because they could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus.

At oral arguments in March, the women Supreme Court justices grilled Hobby Lobby’s lawyer, former Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, about whether a for-profit company can be considered a religious organization, exempt from certain federal laws, if a majority of its employees hold different beliefs than the company’s owners. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan asked whether companies like Hobby Lobby should be allowed to refuse to cover procedures like blood transfusions and vaccines, or to ask for exemptions to things like anti-discrimination and minimum wage laws, if they had religious objections to those policies.

“Everything would be piecemeal, nothing would be uniform,” Kagan warned.

Some of the court’s conservative-leaning justices asked why the Obama administration had granted religious accommodations to any organizations if the contraception mandate was so critical to public health. “It must have been because the health care coverage was not that important,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was generally considered to be the swing vote.

This is a developing story and will be updated.