Today's pair of decisions on religious employers will have broad consequences for workers. According to some estimates, the ruling in Our Lady of Guadalupe means that hundreds of thousands of employees of religious institutions will lose employment-discrimination protections.

And the ruling in Little Sisters of the Poor could mean that between 70,000 and 126,000 women will lose access to free coverage of contraceptives in their employee health plans. That's the government's own estimate of how many people are affected by the expanded exemptions.

The decisions are a big win for businesses with conscientious objections to the ACA contraceptive mandate like Little Sisters & "many other religious objectors who have participated in the litigation" whose employees still have the ability to get coverage from alternative sources