The thing about rights...

... is that they're not absolute.  Your rights only extend so far as they do not interfere with my rights.

It's amazing how the entitlement mentality in today's United States has overridden the ability to show some critical thinking on this topic.

Let's say you're a Sandra Fluke-type woman who can't afford to pay for your own birth control.  Like a self-entitled slutty little brat that you are, you demand your employer pays for it.  Worse yet, you demand the government make your employer pay for it.

First off, I'd like to thank Ted Kennedy for the 40-year-old notion of HMOs that, like so many well-intentioned liberal ideas, had the opposite effect in reality.  Once upon a time, if you got sick, you went to the doctor, the doctor treated you, and you paid the doctor.

But about poor people?  What about expensive medical treatment?  Enter the HMO.

Now, when you visit the doctor, there's a bean counter between you and your doctor.  Medical procedures must follow the Golden Rule:  The HMO has the gold, so it makes the rules about what procedures will be paid for.

Now, your doctor can tell the HMO to beat it, that he/she won't treat patients represented by accountants.  Problem is, the HMO has sold the snake oil of collective bargaining, as pertains to medical costs, to not just you, but everybody in town.  The doctor has no choice:  He/she must treat patients belonging to the HMO or close up shop.

Now the idea of a collective bargaining unit makes some sense if your doctor was charging you an arm and a leg to treat your arm or leg.  But here's the deal:  Medical procedures sometimes do cost a lot of money.  It cost the doctor a lot of money to go through med school.  It cost a lot of money for the company making the IVs, syringes, and gauze to make sure it's all sterile and high quality.  Guess what?  The HMO nickle-and-dimes the doctor?  The doctor will try to recoup the cost of the procedures the HMO won't pay for by increasing the cost of the procedures they will pay for.

Secondly, somewhere along the time, someone with the same good intentions decided it would be smarter if employers, instead of paying you money that you could use to purchase health insurance, that your employer, with its vast resources, took some of the money from payroll and purchased a group health insurance plan.  Along the lines, a law was passed that a for-profit company with more than 50 employees was required to purchase group health insurance.  So now, the government has put a bean counter and your boss in the room with you and your doctor when you're making health care decisions.  The bean counter has some input on what the HMO's money will be spent on.  The employer, with its financial clout, can at least contractually negotiate with the HMO as to what the employer will pay the HMO to cover.  You?  You have the option to pick one of 2-3 group health care plans your employer has funded, or you can keep the money that would be deducted from your paycheck and purchase your own insurance.  Or if you are a healthy person with an occupation that doesn't raise your risk of injury, you can roll the dice and forgo health insurance, opting to pay as you go.

Now as the entity with the money, the employer will make financial decisions based on a variety of things, including economics and morality.  The Supreme Court has ruled that, just because a Christian man or woman starts a business does not mean he/she has forfeited their right to free expression of their religious beliefs.  You come along and tell your employer that you want the company to subsidize your sex life.  Specifically, you want them to subsidize it so you engage in consequence-free behavior, especially when your birth control fails (or you neglect to use it properly) and you need the chemical or surgical equivalent of absolving you of your responsibility.

Your employer, if run by someone who places more value on the quality of life than you have shown, are well within his/her rights to tell you to pound sand and pay for chemical/surgical responsibility-absolution yourself.  When you think about it, does your employer necessarily want to encourage abdication of personal responsibility in its employees?  Wouldn't the next step be abdication of professional responsibility?  Couldn't that potentially cost your employer his or her business in the event of a lawsuit?

The thing about rights:  Your employer, being owned and run by people with the same rights as you, has a right to free expression of their religion just the same as you.  It's in the Bill of Rights, which means its constitutional law.  It's further supported by federal law, specifically the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  The ACA mandate on employers being required to cover birth control, including abortifacents, was a mandate enacted by the Department of Health & Human Services, at least one step removed from being passed into law by Congress (the ACA was passed by Congress, affording power to HHS that I do not agree is constitutional, but that's a topic for another discussion).  Guess what?  When an executive-branch mandate conflicts with federal law at best, the Constitution at worst, the mandate loses.