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| Not a Catholic-owned company ... not that the left cares. |
Has anyone else noticed how very few of the left’s attacks
on SCOTUS’ decision in Burwell v.
Hobby Lobby involve little real legal analysis of the opinion? Perhaps
we shouldn’t be surprised; very few journalists are lawyers, after all, and
many are simply political activists pretending to report news.
Instead, what we see is a lot of unhealthy focus on the
religious and sexual makeup of the bench. Forget that, of the men on the
majority, at least two would continue to uphold Roe v. Wade without reservations; forget that one of those men, just
over a year ago, voted to strike
down DOMA in United States v. Windsor;
forget that one of the two women in the minority shares the same religious
self-identification as the five men in the majority. Haters gonna hate; and
when they hate, facts, logic and even recent history can just go whistle.
As I said of the Windsor
decision, progressivist rhetoric about “the inevitability of change” and being
“on the right side of history” disappears whenever there’s a significant
setback, and various activists and talking heads start talking as though every
key civil right is about to be rolled back. Now HuffPo
is sweating out the implications of Burwell
for gay rights, while the
Guardian’s Jessica Valenti is
hyperventilating over the Court’s “obsession with female purity”.
And through it all are constant references to the number of
Catholic men on the bench and in the majority, as if the decision had been
dictated by Catholic doctrine and Y chromosomes rather than by proper legal
reasoning. They forget that the six Catholics and three Jews on the bench were
all appointed by Protestant presidents; the only Catholic president, Kennedy,
appointed an Episcopalian and a Jew.
Leftists, you see, have their own brand of bigotry.
Typical of this bigotry is Ronald A. Lindsay’s deplorable screed in — take a guess — HuffPo, “The Uncomfortable Question: Should We Have Six Catholic Justices on the Supreme Court?” In trying to get us to answer the question with a “no”, Lindsay not only misrepresents AJ Samuel Alito’s majority opinion but the issues before the Court.
In Justice Alito’s majority opinion, he relies squarely on Catholic teaching about “complicity” to explain the supposed burden. In doing so, he reiterates the argument that the Catholic Church has made in the dozens of lawsuits it has brought challenging the contraceptive mandate. According to the Church, it violates the moral obligations of a Catholic to do anything — anything — that would “facilitate” the provision of contraception to an individual. So even if one is not using contraception oneself, if one facilitates access to contraception by others, a grave moral wrong has been committed.
What does this omit? Well, it omits that “complicity” is
precisely why Conestoga, Mardel and Hobby Lobby — all companies owned by non-Catholics — refused to provide for
certain contraceptives in their employee insurance plans. In fact, Conestoga is
owned by a Mennonite couple; this takes the pith out of Lindsay’s scathing
remark that other cases would “present considerations important to Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Scientologists, Christian Scientists, and the whole host of small minority
religions that don’t have the benefit of having six justices on the Supreme
Court.” It also leaves out that “complicity” is also recognized as a feature of
secular law, which is exactly why accessories to a felony are themselves tried
as felons. No, “complicity” isn’t some quaint religious notion peculiar only to
papists.
Lindsay’s rejoinder: “From a secular, constitutional
perspective — and at least the fiction is that the justices are upholding
secular law — there is no distinction between ‘facilitating’ contraception and
other forms of health care.” However, to say that secular law doesn’t see a
problem with offering employer-subsidized “morning-after pills” is not to prove
that there is no problem, let alone
that the Mennonites who run Hobby Lobby shouldn’t have a problem with them
either.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the constitutionality of which was never in question, was intended to protect people from being compelled by law to do — or “facilitate” — that which they believe to be evil, even if that belief isn’t “religious” per se. To argue that secular law recognizes no problem is simply to restate the reason
why the RFRA exists: “[Laws] ‘neutral’ toward religion may burden religious exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious exercise” (42 USC §2000bb(a)(2)). Contra Lindsay, laws don’t have to trample on religious beliefs to be secular in nature.
In other words, to reach his conclusion, Lindsay had to be
ignorant of — or deliberately exclude — facts about the case, the participants
and the law itself that are readily obtainable even to a neophyte like me. I
find it ironic that a person billed as “President & CEO, Center for Inquiry”
isn’t inquisitive enough to do some elementary research before letting his
biases spill out onto the Internet for all to see.
The focus on the Catholic male component of the majority
tells us more about the biases of the leftist commentariat than it does about
Alito et al. You can, with only minor trouble, find on the Internet gay people
who oppose same-sex marriage, atheists who stand foursquare for religious
rights, women who oppose abortion … and churchgoing Catholic men who are
programmatic liberals (Joe Biden, anyone?).
To argue, then, that only
men are sexist is to be sexist; to argue that only Catholics oppose contraception is false and unfair to all the
non-Catholics who also oppose contraception, as well as to the Catholics who
don’t. The leftist concept of “privilege” allows them to exercise their bigotry
while claiming to fight bigotry … perhaps in the belief that two wrongs do make a right. Leftists say “check
your privilege” precisely so they can give their prejudices free rein while
pretending to curb their opponents’.
Just having celebrated the 238th anniversary of this nation’s
founding, I’d like to believe we’re closer to the realization of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s dream of “one day [living] in a world where people are judged
not by the color of their skin” — that is, by simplistic binary categories — “but
by the content of their character.”
But it’s more than that. In my family history, I have both
Ellis Island and the Mayflower. In my
family tree I find relatives who not only fought against Hitler in Europe and
Tojo in the South Pacific but also against George III in New England.
My Puritan ancestors also had a dream. That dream was that
they could have a voice in their own government without having to give up or
even modify their religious beliefs. That was the dream the Constitutional
Convention tried to encode in Article VI, Section 6,
which forbids religious tests as a qualification for government posts. That was
the dream the First Congress tried to encode in the First Amendment,
which gives everyone a voice in the public square regardless of religion. After
all these years, Lindsay’s “uncomfortable question” shouldn’t even arise, let
alone get a “no”.
How strange it is that the dream of Puritans must be
defended by Catholics. And how strange it is that, over two hundred years after
the ratification of the Constitution, we’re still trying to impose religious
tests. Unfortunately, anti-Catholic bigotry is also a Puritan legacy.
