The decades-long practice of rolling back the massive expansion of individual liberties under the Warren Court is indeed a saddening and terrible shame, but I don't think that's what you mean at all...
This is what the merits were about and it has absolutely nothing to do with ****ing religious freedom:
Ralph’s Thriftway, a grocery store and pharmacy in Olympia, Wash., owned by a religious Christian family, brought the challenge. The family said it believes that life begins at conception and that “preventing the uterine implantation of a fertilized egg is tantamount to abortion,” Alito wrote. (There is disagreement about whether emergency contraception is an abortifacient.). The pharmacy’s employees inform those who request Plan B or other emergency contraception that the store does not stock the drugs and refers customers to pharmacies that do. But regulations issued in 2007 by the Washington State Board of Pharmacy require that all pharmacies stock the drugs. The regulations do not require an individual pharmacist to dispense the drugs but say stores must have on hand one pharmacist who will.
1. Religious freedom has never - and SHOULD never - be interpreted to mean that you do not have to do anything or have anything done to you, regardless of context, simply because you say the words "that violates my religious beliefs." And yet that is what would be required to say such a regulation violates religious freedom. As the article notes, the businesses only needed to make sure to have one employee on hand who isn't trying to lord their "religion" over everyone else.
2. The religious freedom claim is always hypocrisy in these circumstances, whether it's a specific refusal to serve gay people or this sort of thing. These would-be saints don't turn away adulterers, those who have once been convicted of lareny, or even those who have ever cursed their father (that last one merits death by stoning in the old testament, btw).
3. Businesses open to the public cannot discriminate on the basis of things like gender, religion, etc. I see this issue completely the opposite way around: if a business open to the republic refuses to sell emergency contraception, it is not done in practice of that businesses religion (not that businesses have religions), it is discrimination against those who would buy the contraception on the basis of their religion. It is the store refusing a customer because the store's owner disagrees with various categories of religious belief: religions not opposed to contraception, non-religious spiritual belief that has no problem with contraception, etc.
Hopefully, if awful Hillary is elected, she'll appoint some more moderate justices and perhaps the court will slap all of this garbage away. There simply never has been nor ever should be a right for a business open to the public to refuse to serve people who do not follow the businesses' religious mandates in all respects. That belongs in a Sharia Law country, not here
