The Hobby Lobby verdict will determine if religious freedom truly exists in this country or not.

If Hobby Lobby loses, we might as well be back in 17th-century England when the Puritans realized that they would be unable to practice their religion unless they left home for a far-off wilderness.

The Constitution’s Freedom of Religion clause was specifically adopted to prevent such religious intolerance in America. Yet here is our government forcing photographers and bakers to help celebrate homosexuality, which is against their religions, by contributing their talents to homosexual weddings.

The fact that six of the Supreme Court Justices are Catholic and three are Jewish is relevant, because both religions have been persecuted in other lands and would have been persecuted in America also without America’s specific constitutional protection against religious intolerance.

The consequences of this Court’s rejecting Hobby Lobby’s religious rights and therefore religious freedom in America are hard to fathom.

First they came for America’s religious employers, and I did not speak out — because I was not a religious employer. Then they came for religious orders like the Little Sisters of the Poor, and I did not speak out — because I was not part of a religious order. Then, when the economy collapsed, they came, as always, for the Jews — and nobody cared because without Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer our religious freedoms would not have been destroyed and the pogroms against their fellow Jews would not have started.