In response to Fugelsgang on Hobby Lobby: ‘Scalia Law a lot Like Sharia Law’:
It’s tempting to dismiss these hysterics as the work of people who aren’t the sharpest tools in the drawer, but it would be more accurate to say that they have a low, and probably accurate, impression of how gullible their readers are. And it’s not so much that the readers are stupid, as that they are highly motivated, and lack intellectual discrimination.
This stuff about contraceptive mandates (really, more to the point of the Hobby Lobby case, abortifacient mandates) became an important issue to the constitutionalist and religious Right because it’s a fairly obvious case of the government imposing its agenda in defiance of religious liberty. That’s exactly how the Left sees it, too – they’re just on the other side. And with their typical Alinskyite fervor, they’re not too picky about getting all the little details of the situation right, as long as it ends with the supremacy of collectivist power. They’ll campaign on this decision as if it were a far more serious threat to the socialist order than it actually is, because they want another shot at it – maybe under a different Supreme Court, or maybe with administrative decisions that do an end-run around what the Supreme Court said, such as knocking those “closely-held corporations” out of the loop and having the government pay for all the “free” contraceptives it wants, using seized monies from the general treasury. The hammer of tax-and-spend is powerful enough to smash any Constitutional objections.
They’ll say idiotic things like “Scalia Law is a lot like Sharia Law” even though we know they don’t really have that much of a problem with sharia law – because they love savagely attacking the people who do criticize it as insensitive, intolerant brutes. They say these things because they’ve been working hard to build a continuum described by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent from the Hobby Lobby case: the only alternative to hate-filled anarchy is the iron power of the total State. We look at the Left’s claims that the ObamaCare contraceptive mandates are a frail bulwark against domination by a Christian theocracy and laugh, but they know their supporters eat that stuff up like candy – not because they actually believe it, but because they want to see their political adversaries defeated, as often and as harshly as possible. They’re angry today because they were really looking forward to throwing a victory parade for compulsive, all-encompassing government – the just and mighty incarnation of the General Will – after Hobby Lobby was brought to its knees.
This isn’t really about contraceptives, and no one really believes that asking women (or men) to pay a couple of bucks for their own birth control is a soul-crushing imposition, tantamount to banning those goods. Notice that nobody on the Left batted an eyelash when Sandra Fluke admitted she made up the costs she screamed about during her phony “Congressional hearing,” a theatrical performance whose explicit – and entirely false – argument was that young female college students were getting bankrupted by the cost of birth control. Actual reality doesn’t matter to a political argument like this – it’s about the principle of submission.
The almighty collective State hath decreed that birth control is some kind of super-human-right, which must be provided for “free,” and no individual moral objection can be allowed to stand against that command. It really does bug the hell out of them that even a narrow group of people has a limited ability to resist, but rest assured they won’t be told to take the punch, accept the “settled law of the land,” and go home, the way conservatives always are after a Supreme Court decision the don’t like. They’ll try again, and continue pushing with other instruments of legal submission, until the general notion of a controlling central authority, with the legal right to actively compel us to do what our Ruling Class decides is in our best interests, has been fully embraced.