Can a corporation have a religion?: Hobby Lobby challenge to contraception mandate heads to Supreme Court Justices will decide Tuesday whether to hear an appeal of a lower court's ruling affirming Hobby Lobby's "religion"

The owners of Hobby Lobby, a chain of crafts stores that plays religious music for shoppers, provides employees free "spiritual counseling" and closes down every Sunday, have been fighting tooth and nail to avoid providing their employees with the comprehensive reproductive healthcare required under the Obama Administration's healthcare reforms because, they argue, allowing women to determine if and and what kind of birth control to use is a violation of its religious beliefs.

As the New York Times notes, a federal appeals court agreed with Hobby Lobby on that issue, and now the Supreme Court on Tuesday will decide whether or not to hear the Obama administration’s appeal of that decision.

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The majority opinion from the lower court's ruling stated with some confidence that the high court would likely affirm its decision. “We see no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression,” Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich wrote for the majority. Though a dissenting opinion in that same ruling called the decision “nothing short of a radical revision of First Amendment law.”

If the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, its final ruling will have major implications for the limits of corporate personhood and the "religious expression" of corporations, as well as for the administration's embattled healthcare law.

“The stakes here, symbolically and politically, are very high,” Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told the Times.

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