Ultimately, the sponsors were forced to accept a fig-leaf religious exemption, so narrow as to be almost meaningless. As the ACLU summarized it in a brief supporting the law, it exempts "clergy officials and members of religious orders, who serve primarily spiritual missions and serve the church congregation" but not religious "hospitals, universities and relief agencies." The Catholic Church would be forced to buy birth control for lay administrators at a Catholic hospital, but not for the nun who takes care of the chapel.
Another brief filed collectively by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, the Worldwide Church of God and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said: "The legislation challenged here is the camel's nose under the tent, the cutting edge of an attempt, by making a church pay for what it explicitly opposes, in effect to silence a church's message and mission anytime it does not conform to the prevailing secular wisdom."
With all due respect, the churches are wrong about just one thing here. The camel's nose was already under the tent. It went under when government succeeded in dictating to private businessmen of whatever religious denomination, or of no religion at all, just exactly what sort of insurance coverage they must offer their workers. The beast was up and stumbling under the canopy when no battle was pitched to protect individual Catholic entrepreneurs, as opposed to the church as an institution, from being forced to purchase artificial birth control for their employees.
Individual liberty fell first.
"Today's case is about contraceptives," said the churches' brief. "Tomorrow's will present some other issue that elicits public division, such as abortion, assisted suicide, cloning, or some issue of self-governance, such as the use of resources for evangelization or who a religious agency may hire to do ministry."
There is no doubt these battles are coming. Those who fight them should remember that they are not about the liberty of one group, or one religious denomination. They are about liberty, period.