SCOTUS’ Hobby Lobby case came down to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That law passed Congress by overwhelming majorities and was signed by President Bill Clinton in November 1993.
But the way that the court decided the case, with five men in the majority and the court’s women in dissent, probably couldn’t have broken better politically for Democrats than it did. The decision has no effect on the vast majority of Americans at all. Not one single person will be denied access to contraceptives. Hobby Lobby itself covers 16 types of contraception in its employee health coverage. The company’s owners just refused to cover four specific drugs because they act after conception.
But Democrats like Hillary Clinton get to use the decision as a wedge issue to fire up the party base through the summer. Which is the main thing that the mandate was actually set up to achieve. It’s not about “access,” over which there is no crisis. It’s about creating a wedge issue to make people angry, grow government and fire up the progressive base — which brook absolutely no dissent from their worldview.
Hillary Clinton on Monday called the Supreme Court’s ruling in the contraception-related Hobby Lobby case “deeply disturbing.”
The former secretary of state and possible Democratic front-runner skewered the decision during an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, hours after the Supreme Court ruled that for-profit employers don’t have to provide contraception coverage, mandated under Obamacare, if they have religious objections.
“It’s the first time that our court has said that a closely held corporation has the rights of a person when it comes to religious freedom, which means the corporation’s … [‘closely held’] employers can impose their religious beliefs on their employees, and, of course, denying women the right to contraceptives as part of a health care plan is exactly that,” she said. “I find it deeply disturbing that we are going in that direction.”
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“It’s very troubling that a sales clerk at Hobby Lobby who need contraception, which is pretty expensive, is not going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception,” Clinton said. Her remarks came during a Facebook Live session at Aspen.
None of that is correct. Not even close. The Green family object to four specific abortifacient drugs. If Hillary’s clerk wants to use one of those, she may pay for it herself. She just cannot demand that the Greens cover it, against their religious beliefs. The Greens do cover 16 other contraceptives. They were not even required to do that, until the Obamacare mandate was invented by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The so-called “smartest woman in the world” cannot be so wrong about this by accident. So she must be choosing to lie. She’s a Clinton, so that’s hardly a wild claim to make. Hillary herself was even fired from the Watergate investigation for being a liar, when she was a budding young feminist.
Clinton did address the RFRA’s relevance to the Hobby Lobby decision.
Asked about a measure signed by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, tied to protecting religious beliefs under federal law, Clinton said it was authorized “because, at that point, there were legitimate cases of discrimination against religions. The people who wanted to build a church, or a synagogue, or a mosque in a community and they fit into the zoning, but the community was saying, ‘We don’t want one of those in our community’.”
This really gets at the progressive worldview. Exercising a right collectively is fine, just as progressives claim to support the right to “worship” while they chip away at the right of Christians to act on faith in their daily lives. But exercising that same right individually, over your own property (the Greens own Hobby Lobby as their family business) is not allowed.
It’s totalitarian, and all the more glaringly hypocritical when it comes from people who claim to hold individual rights above all else.
The Hobby Lobby case should never have been a case at all. A government that respects religious freedom would not have fought it all the way to the highest court. The Obama government, progressive to its core, doesn’t respect any rights of anyone who stand in the way of creating a useful, cynical wedge issue.
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