Democrats do dumb

The hysterical reaction to the Hobby Lobby decision has laid bare the continuing decline in the left's ability to employ logic, or to even acknowledge inconvenient facts.

At the heart of the ruling was the question of whether certain entities (in this case narrowly held corporations like Hobby Lobby) can opt out of compliance with certain aspects of federal law for religious reasons (in this case, the contraceptive mandate under Obamacare). What this meant in more precise legal terms was that the Supreme Court was asked to weigh two apparently inconsistent laws--the Affordable Care Act (ACA), from which the contraceptive mandate flowed, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1992, which requires strict scrutiny of federal laws that impinge upon religious practices.

By a 5-4 decision, the court leaned in favor of the latter over the former, sort of like the Constitution's First Amendment does.

The issue of the compatibility of governmental power and religious belief has been a murky and treacherous one since the founding of the republic, such that reasonable people can differ as to the proper degree of deference that the first should extend to the second. The authority of the federal government (and federal law) is important; so too, in a nation founded on it, is the idea of religious liberty.

But the troubling part of the Hobby Lobby decision wasn't the decision per se, which involved the difficult parsing of precedent and contradictory statutes, but the claims made by critics suggestive of minds that no longer work properly.

The lead editorial in the New York Times bizarrely called it "imposing religion on workers." For the ubiquitous Sandra Fluke it was "an attack on women." Hillary Clinton, apparently pandering to the single-women vote for 2016, said it was "very troubling" that a sales clerk at Hobby Lobby would suffer because "her employer doesn't think she should be using contraception."

So let us unpack the logic of all this, including the political accusations and counter-accusations, from the ground up.

First, contrary to Hillary's ignorant claim, Hobby Lobby doesn't exclude contraceptives from its health-care packages. Rather, it provides 16 of the 20 forms prescribed by the Department of Health and Human Services under the ACA. The four it resists providing, and which were at the heart of the SCOTUS ruling, are, according to the religious views of Hobby Lobby's owners, abortifacients due to their close resemblance to abortion.

Second, there is the stubborn fact that no one has to work at Hobby Lobby who doesn't want to. Slavery hasn't existed in America for 150 or so years now, and the myriad injustices of capitalism don't make us "wage slaves" as Marxists claim either, not even in the era of the Great Recession. Thus, if people don't like Hobby Lobby's health-care provisions or the religious convictions which might influence them, they remain free to work (and shop) elsewhere, although one suspects that precious few will be so aggrieved by the recent ruling as to actually do so.

It remains, at last glance, a free country, for employers, workers and consumers alike.

Finally, we can move from the facts of the case to the proclamation of absurd principles, most conspicuous of which is that denying women free contraceptives on demand is an infringement of their rights.

Sorry, but it doesn't (or at least shouldn't) work that way. The refusal of party A to provide party B with product C free of charge isn't an infringement of anyone's rights (except perhaps Party A's, if coerced to do so by the government). Only in the tortured logical world of liberalism can the refusal to provide somebody with something for free be construed as an effort to oppress that somebody or to ban that something.

Along these lines, I personally would like a new Jaguar XE, but it doesn't seem reasonable to claim that I am being oppressed and my rights violated if my employer offered me free of charge other models but refused for whatever reasons to buy me that particular one. In such circumstances, those I work for would hardly be "imposing their values" upon me, or attempting to dictate my means of transportation or to ban cars in general.

This isn't a "women's rights" issue because no one has a constitutional right to free contraceptives, any more than I do to a free automobile, a hot tub, or a month-long vacation in Tahiti.

To restate: Hobby Lobby isn't "imposing" anything on anybody. Its owners aren't asking anyone to subscribe to their particular religious views and their employees remain free to worship or not worship as they please, and to continue to use contraceptives if they wish. All that the court's ruling did was prevent the Obama administration from imposing its values upon Hobby Lobby.

Beyond all of this, though, can be found an operational principle that gets all of us off the political hook, which would be for everyone to pick up the tab for their own contraceptives (and most other things).

Your sex life is none of my business. So don't ask me (or anyone else) to pay for it.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 07/14/2014

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