Alito’s majority opinion in Hobby Lobby tried to sell it is a narrow one, leading to some predictable contrarianism. Alas, this narrative couldn’t even survive the week. Lithwick and West are great on the Wheaton College order:

The dissenters take issue with several aspects of the majority’s act. First is the professed scope of the Hobby Lobby decision. Try to remember all the way back to Monday, when, writing for the majority, Justice Alito folded up the decision into something he characterized as nearly trivial. Look, it practically fits into his pocket! The decision only applied to family-owned, closely-held corporations, he assured us. The ruling was not going to unsettle a thing. “Our decision in these cases is concerned solely with the contraceptive mandate,” he soothed. Nothing about the holding would undermine an employer’s responsibility to provide vaccines to his employees, or to abide by existing employment and antidiscrimination laws. “Our decision should not be understood to hold that an insurance-coverage mandate must necessarily fall if it conflicts with an employer’s religious beliefs,” he wrote. But nowhere in his opinion did Alito tell us how or why there would be no such fallout. It was an assertion; or, in light of what happened next, a nice little act of judicial three-card monte.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his own concurrence to Hobby Lobby, cautioned us not to read too much into the precedent that he had just helped set, insisting that the majority opinion “does not have the breadth and sweep ascribed to it by the respectful and powerful dissent.” But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as she is so often reminded, was not born yesterday. In her Hobby Lobby dissent, she disputed the narrowness of the rule and charged that the court had just waded into a “minefield.” She was right.

In the hours after the Hobby Lobby ruling came down, the court was already kicking a host of cases back to various lower courts for reconsideration in light of the new rule. Three courts of appeals were told to revisit decisions, including at least one that involved an employer with religious objections to all 20 contraception methods guaranteed under the ACA, and not just the four ruled out in Hobby Lobby. Another is the appeal from an employer whose claims about burdens on his religious liberty started out as religious, but became a libertarian screed. “I don’t care if the federal government is telling me to buy my employees Jack Daniel’s or birth control,” Michael Potter, the head of Eden Foods confessed to MSNBC’s Irin Carmon last fall. “What gives them the right to tell me that I have to do that? That’s my issue, that’s what I object to, and that’s the beginning and end of the story.” That “religious” objection will now be taken seriously in the courts, bearing in mind, as Justice Alito cautioned, that “[i]t is not for us to say that their religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial.” These nearly instantaneous acts by the court quickly made the narrow little Hobby Lobby ruling seem like much, much more. (Meanwhile, at Guantánamo Bay, real-live detainees are now petitioning the court for the same personhood status as Hobby Lobby so that they too may exercise religious freedom.)