The injunction in Newland was not based on First Amendment claims but on a federal statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This act requires the government to demonstrate a compelling interest in regulations that substantially burden religion. In Newland, the district court found the government's compelling interest in uniform application of a public health measure was "undermined" by "numerous exemptions to the preventive care mandate," including contraception care exemptions offered to religious institutions.

In other words, if the law were less accommodating, the government would have a stronger interest in uniformly enforcing it. But if the law were less accommodating to religion, it would have been quite vulnerable to First Amendment challenges. Pursuant to the Court's reasoning in Newland, the government can't win.

Judge Kane did stress that the injunction in this case applied only to Hercules Industries. But while the injunction is limited, the principle on which it's based has extraordinary reach and could dramatically expand legal immunity for religious practices and beliefs.

If religious objections to contraception and sterilization merit an exemption from federal law, then so could religious objections to hiring gay people or single mothers (or married ones, for that matter). Why, after all, should religious teachings on reproduction be privileged over other articles of faith? If the principle underlying the Newland injunction takes hold, it's hard to imagine any strongly held belief of any religious group that would not merit an exemption from a burdensome federal law.

Not long ago (at least not long ago in the life of the law), the Supreme Court emphatically rejected the proposition that the First Amendment requires exempting people from laws that violate their religious beliefs. In 1990, in Employment Division v Smith, the Court held:

The right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes). To make an individual's obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law's coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the State's interest is "compelling" -- permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, 'to become a law unto himself,' ... contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense.

Congress disagreed. In response to this case, it enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, requiring a compelling interest in laws substantially burdening religion. Eventually, the Court effectively disagreed with the Smith decision, too. In January 2012, in Hosannah Tabor v EEOC, it granted a church-affiliated institution broad, First Amendment-based exemptions from federal civil rights laws.