Hobby Lobby

I saw the argument offered by George Takei–who I follow on Facebook because he often posts somewhat amusing bits–that this case would be much clearer if they were attempting to impose Sharia law.

With all due respect to whatever else he does well, this actually argues FOR the decision, not against it.

Freedom, if it is anything, is freedom of conscience.  It is freedom both from coercion to do things you think are wrong, and freedom TO do things you feel are right.  You can both not support abortion directly AND give to charities which oppose abortion.  Congress shall neither impose a national religion, nor interfere with existing ones.  This is very clear, and very logical.

The entirety of the outrage over the decision arises from the assumption by the left that their viewpoint is the only morally valid one, that “reproductive rights” are absolute.  This is not different in principle from the idea that all morality proceeds from the Koran and Hadith and Sunnah.  Both are absolutisms, dogmatisms.  All their arguments proceed from this assumption, from this failure to recognize the right of anyone anywhere in our body politic to oppose their version of moral reality.

I think all of us would oppose a national mandate for women to wear the hijab, and would support a Supreme Court decision which reversed it.  This is the point: our national government does not have the right and authority under the Constitution to make people violate their moral beliefs, to force them to do things they don’t want to do.

Women are not prohibited from getting Morning After pills by law, even if they work at Hobby Lobby.  Nor are they prohibited from buying their own insurance elsewhere.  They are neither forced to do anything they don’t want to do, nor prohibited from doing what they do want to do.  This is freedom.

What freedom is not is using the power of law to impose one set of moral views on a heterogeneous group.  All genuine diversity requires compromise, respect, and efforts at understanding.  The left does not do this with ANY group which genuinely differs from them.  That is why they are fascist at their core.

And to be clear, the argument, from the perspective of Hobby Lobby, is whether or not they can be forced by law to facilitate murder.  All one has to do transform this debate from one side to the other is put an = between “woman’s body” and “baby”.  The former construction, self evidently, is propagandistic, and in my view has led directly to a coarsening of our actual public morality, capacity for empathy, and even the skill with which we raise children.  There is a cost to treating helpless infants as lumps of unimportant flesh; and life itself as a disposable commodity.