John Roberts offers conservatives a way out of birth control dilemma: http://t.co/5CSxAO94mb

— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) March 27, 2014

Skeptics of the legal challenge to Obamacare’s birth control mandate warn that a ruling against it could declare open season on virtually any law that a person or business can mount a religious-based objection to. If Hobby Lobby can be exempt because of its owners’ Christian beliefs, Justice Elena Kagan wondered, what legal principle would stop other corporations from seeking religious-based exemptions from minimum wage or sex discrimination laws?

Chief Justice John Roberts, expressing deep skepticism toward the contraceptive mandate during Supreme Court arguments on Tuesday, offered conservatives a way out of that dilemma. He contended that “closely held” businesses, like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, who brought the case, could be given that option without opening the same door for publicly owned companies.

So basically, Roberts is trying to thread the needle here. He seems to want to create an exemption for a privately held company with a small, core group of investors. Once you’re a larger corporation or a publicly traded company, however, that’s it. The “religious freedom” argument would no longer apply. In practice, this would mean that companies like Koch Industries, Hobby Lobby, and Chik-Fil-A could deny birth control coverage to their employees since they’re all private, but Walmart, Papa John’s, and Domino’s Pizza could not, at least not without buying back all their shares first.

An exemption like that would be interesting if it actually happened, especially in terms of future recruitment and/or retention of female employees.