When former President Barack Obama was in office, his administration fought all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to force Americans to act against their consciences by providing insurance coverage for contraceptives -- including abortifacients -- through a federal regulation issued under the so-called Affordable Care Act.

The Supreme Court seemed to have decided this question in its 2014 opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., and its 2020 opinion in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania.

In the Hobby Lobby case, the family-owned business sued then-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, arguing that the regulation forcing them to provide coverage for contraceptives in their employee health insurance plan violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. They also argued that it violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

That act was signed into law by former President Bill Clinton in 1993. According to its official summary, it "prohibits any agency, department, or official of the United States or any State (the government) from substantially burdening a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, except that the government may burden a person's exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person: (1) furthers a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest."

The court ruled 5-4 in favor of Hobby Lobby.

"We must decide in these cases whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 ... permits the United States Department of Health and........

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