SCOTUS' decision and its naive slippery slope

The appalling naivite -- or their crass manipulativeness, take your pick -- of several recent landmark Supreme Court decisions is really troubling.    Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion on the Hobby Lobby case, for example, blithely says it is a narrow decision which only applies to the specific case in question.   That is, it allowed the exception only in the case of four specific methods of birth control that the plaintiffs claim are actually abortions, but which scientific testimony says are not.   It was not a ruling on contraception, in general, or to more general religious objections concerning federal regulations of commerce, like whether a public services company can refuse to serve gays, citing religious objections to their "life style."

However, the day after the Hobby Lobby decision was announced, the court confirmed that the ruling, by not commenting on them, actually left in place lower court rulings that favored businesses that object on religious grounds to all 20 methods of government-approved contraception.   Thus the slippery slope of the ruling that was ostensibly about "abortion" (even though they were wrong about the facts)  Did Alito and his four concurees not understand -- when he issued his majority opinion -- that it actually was broader and left in place objections, mainly from Roman Catholics, about contraception in general?   If they all did understand it, why did they sign off on language that called it a narrow decision applying only to this case?

It seems at least we have a slippery slope in terms of the understanding what the decision actually does. even by the justices who concurred in the majority opinion.  Some critics have even called the opinion incoherent and inconsistent.  They're all lawyers, and they have smart law clerks.   Doesn't anybody really vet these things?   

It's certainly not reassuring when what comes from the court is not just a position you strongly disagree with, but seems so poorly thought out and so sloppily written.

Ralph

PS:  I had already written this post to put up later when I read a different perspective from a Senior Fellow of the Emory University Center for Study of Law and Religion.  I decided to go ahead and post this one above as written -- because it is consistent with the main argument from the left -- and then write another blog about the other point of view for tomorrow.