Paying taxes falls firmly within the exceptions put inside the RFRA.
It may, but my point is more that a can of worms has been opened where no one knows where the new (Alito) interpretation or test (he says, supposedly) "for" that law's scope seems to end. There's something odd here where the religious right (and the Court) start and finish on fussing about things they supposedly "won't" decide. Rather than declare more generally about whatever
should positively be considered reasonable burden or accommodation or not, they both speak more to the effect of: "Hey precisely because the Court will not decide who is sincere, it has to assume all who say they are, ARE sincere in a belief and thus every belief on every identity and situation has to be tested as a separate case."
There was a time when conservatives so loved to pick on liberals for not having a singular, predictable way of living that made them all one manageable group (and moreover, for so horrifyingly
daring to celebrate that as a reality!) ... And now that the right has learned to play the
language of a minority without really even having similar demographics or identical values as the side that once developed that playbook, look where "religious belief" is taking things in terms of policy demands...
So it's not so unreasonable for analysts to wonder if they won't do what Alito is reported to have done, and misread the RFRA as covering more than it does. And on that note: Perhaps you can have the Lee standard if you like OR you can have the RFRA (whichever one feels should work), but from that earlier reading: It sounds like maybe we cannot actually use
both simultaneously, not without papering over a conflict between them.
On top of that, it seems like it's turning into a fuss where every single possible objection winds up in court. Which is the "minefield" Ginsberg has warned of. I guess one might also feel that is just the court's job... But in practice when much feels up for grabs again, there is a whole lot of vitriol and backstabbing going around in public during the years of waiting for cases to pass through the whole system, hoping to elbow in exceptions that were not so seriously considered before.
Also seems to me that "least restrictive" as used here, is sometimes hard to evaluate before the fact of implementation and development of an actual, working policy. (How is one going to test that and make a sound prediction with all other factors covered, exactly -- does the Supreme Court really hand each case off to the Congressional Budget Office, if that were enough?) If Canada had stopped building a national care system based on such objections when people found some issues with the first iteration, then I doubt they would have come to the same place they are in today. The broader American faction that houses the religious right is also the one that tends to say it's all the poor's fault, they should have to pay for themselves and neither richer brackets nor companies (that is, none of those people with well over half the wealth) should have to contribute too much to bring down those general costs that are obviously tearing apart the whole national economy.
There will always be someone saying there is some
possible still more practical way... But then, government is not always practical and one cannot always simply force it to be whatever one anticipates would be more efficient. In practice, the US government (particularly the Court) lately tends to err well on the side of defending amorphous, often distant and dispersed (rather than simply "national") corporate interests through concepts like 'property' and expansive 'personhood' more than it worries about saving the average human being. But it's not so easy to expect that to go away just because one is offended, either.
The left has been calling moral outrage for ages and only had very limited success where it has had any... So I suspect there is no simple and obvious reason that the religious right screaming moral repugnance is going to be able to remove all but the most obviously 'efficient' laws any better. Quite regardless of what one may think of the motives behind either side trying for change... Everyone is getting a dose of kick in the face to their values? Except I suspect, a few of the filthy rich maybe.
The government itself argues that insurers who cover companies who are exempted from the ACA birth control requirements and thus cover it themselves will not experience an increase in costs.
Could you provide a link to how that works? I thought the general point of getting corporations to pay a portion of so many things, was that without corporations contributing some standard amount, consumer costs of the services are higher. Unless you are somehow arguing that the marginal costs of that particular service were somehow negligible in the first place. I don't think many people would say that about abortion prices.
Though if the government somehow gets to turn around and tear down company price structures
anyway (??), hey be my guest. Or we could do that in the first place, and listen to the religious group complaints about how suddenly abortion was
generally more affordable perhaps? It would be quite ironic if the government were moved to do it only because companies like Hobby Lobby objected to paying
for abortion policies at all.

Maybe there is more to this puzzle though?