After Hobby Lobby, Democrats Seek To Make Birth Control Campaign Issue

Democrats are planning to push a legislative agenda to overturn the Supreme Court's ruling allowing some businesses to receive exemptions from Obamacare's contraceptive mandate, The Hill reported.

Recognizing the role single women played in Barack Obama's re-election, Democrats already had been pushing the "war on women" theme, but want to seize on the visibility of the Hobby Lobby case.

"This will be a huge motivator for women in the fall and a liability for Republican candidates up and down the map," Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) spokesman Justin Barasky told The Hill.

The drawback to this strategy is that single women do not tend to vote as often in midterm elections, The Washington Post said.

On Capitol Hill, legislators are considering several ways in which they can amend the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the law passed almost unanimously by Congress and signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Almost immediately after the Supreme Court issued its decision on June 30, Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin announced plans to introduce legislation to require all corporations who plan on "using this Supreme Court decision to deny or limit contraception services to disclose this policy to all employed and applicants for employment."

A day later, the left-leaning Center for American Progress also weighed in with a legislative proposal to amend RFRA to "clarify that one person’s religious liberty does not allow the person to impose their beliefs on, or discriminate against, others. Such action would bring RFRA to the level that Congress intended — providing strong religious liberty protections for those who deserve it, but ensuring that the provided exemptions do not burden others."

MoveOn.org has started a petition calling on supporters to tell Congress, "I support birth control and I vote."

Despite her strong dissenting argument, some liberals believe the Hobby Lobby case underscores the urgency for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire so that Obama can replace her with an equally-liberal justice.

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