Toobin makes two large errors

“You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” This quote is attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and it's true no matter who said it first. With that in mind, we have to make some corrections to Jeffrey Toobin's article praising Ruth Ginsberg for being, oh, so smart and prescient in her Hobby Lobby dissent.

There was an exemption already for religious institutions. Hobby Lobby, a closely held corporation, is a secular, for-profit business, but the Court held that because the owners of Hobby Lobby held a sincere religious belief that certain forms of birth control caused abortions, they could deny employer-paid insurance coverage for them.

Is this just bad writing? Unclear. It's not a "religious belief" at all that "certain forms of birth control caused abortions" or, I think he means to write cause abortions. But syntax errors aside, there are certain forms of birth control which cause abortions. The links here would be useful to Mr. Toobin as sort of a science primer.

One of the problems with the whole debate and discussion is that "birth control" is somewhat of a misnomer. Birth prevention is really the goal of both contraception and abortion. The latter is more morally egregious than the former, but those who approve of contraception but are against abortion may want to consider the continued use of the softer phrase "birth control" as something which dilutes the strength of pro-life/pro-child argument against the anti-child mentality, or the contraceptive mentality as it is sometimes called.

Here's the next "mistake":

What about religious individuals who say that they have sincere objections to conducting business relationships with gay people or immigrants?

Oh stop it. You obviously mean, Mr. Toobin, to indicate illegal immigrants, so why not use the word? The use of the single, neutral word "immigrants" is meant to suppress or diminish the amount of eye-roll from the general public who are tired of the gay whining.

This line should offend legal immigrants tremendously because it implicitly lumps them together with illegals. Why? Because no mainstream religious denomination objects to legal immigration. This article is obviously written from a biased point-of-view, but these errors are either due to sloppiness and laziness or malevolence and they need to be pointed out whichever is the case.

For Me, Not For Thee

I am registered at The Daily Kos blog under the name of Gary. So I get all their blast emails about how we all need to support Obama, kiss Elizabeth Warren's butt, throw the Koch brothers in jail for something, etc. I do this because I think it's good to know what the enemy is yammering on about. Here's the latest one I got, with my emphasis in italics:

Gary, almost 90,000 people signed our pledge to boycott Hobby Lobby after an ultra-conservative Supreme Court ruled that for-profit corporations are not only people can have religion, but people who can impose that religion on their employees.

Your signature is missing. Please add your name: Boycott Hobby Lobby.

We can vote with our dollars to register our dissent.

Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers, Daily Kos

I would be the last person to disagree with the statement "We can vote with our dollars to register our dissent." But ironically that is what this entire case is about! The people who own Hobby Lobby are willing to pay for 16 different types of birth control but believe that 4 types are morally reprehensible and they don't want to be forced spend their dollars on those. They don't tell their employees not to go and pay for these themselves any more that they force them to attend mandatory Bible study meetings.

Minor point: the notion that the Supreme Court is ultra-conservative is almost as silly as Harry Reid's suggestion that Justice Clarence Thomas is white.

Rights Versus Entitlements

Megan McArdle explains what is going on underneath the Hobby Lobby furor. Here's her first home-run paragraph:

I think a few things are going on here. The first is that while the religious right views religion as a fundamental, and indeed essential, part of the human experience, the secular left views it as something more like a hobby, so for them it’s as if a major administrative rule was struck down because it unduly burdened model-train enthusiasts. That emotional disconnect makes it hard for the two sides to even debate; the emotional tenor quickly spirals into hysteria as one side says “Sacred!” and the other side says, essentially, “Seriously? Model trains?” That shows in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, where it seems to me that she takes a very narrow view of what role religious groups play in the lives of believers and society as a whole.

So that is part one, kind of a "don't hold your deeply-held beliefs any deeper than anyone who doesn't have any deeply-held beliefs" on the part of the secular left.

The second part of the explanation is the classic rights versus entitlements struggle. Conservatives want rights, liberals want entitlements. McArdle describes these as negative rights and positive rights.

All of us learned some version of “You have the right to your beliefs, but not to impose them on others” in civics class. It’s a classic negative right. And negative rights are easy to make reciprocal: You have a right to practice your religion without interference, and I have a right not to have your beliefs imposed on me.

This works very well in situations in which most of the other rights granted by society are negative rights, because negative rights don’t clash very often. Oh, sure, you’re going to get arguments about noise ordinances and other nuisance abatements, but unless your religious practices are extreme indeed, the odds that they will substantively violate someone else’s negative rights are pretty slim.

...

In this context, “Do what you want, as long as you don’t try to force me to do it, too” works very well, which is why this verbal formula has had such a long life. But when you introduce positive rights into the picture, this abruptly stops working. You have a negative right not to have your religious practice interfered with, and say your church forbids the purchase or use of certain forms of birth control. If I have a negative right not to have my purchase of birth control interfered with, we can reach a perhaps uneasy truce where you don’t buy it and I do. But if I have a positive right to have birth control purchased for me, then suddenly our rights are directly opposed: You have a right not to buy birth control, and I have a right to have it bought for me, by you.

I think this all is worth taking a lot of time to meditate on. For example, I'm a parent. In a sense it's true to say that my kids are entitled to "free food" since they can't earn it themselves. However, to me, it is much more true to say that my wife and I have the responsibility to feed them than it is to say they have the right to free food. So I have to figure out how to earn the money to do that and my wife has to figure out how to deliver meals to them three times a day, etc. Any entitlement they could claim is secondary and subsidiary to my actions in carrying out my duty.

The language of positive rights or entitlements devoid of any discussion of reciprocal responsibilities is what is found in many places on the left today. For example, people on unemployment are suppose to be looking for work and applying for so many jobs a week. But do they really? If you are out of work you can get low-cost or no-cost tech training in most states; I have a friend who did that. He hated being taxpayer-subsidized, but I'm afraid he's an exception. I've run into many more people who are sitting around waiting for the factory to re-open, content to subsist and blame whoever they dislike for their predicament.

I could go on with more, but you get it. Not only do our negative rights not clash with each other, they fit hand-in-glove with the personal responsibility that is part of the inherent dignity of the human person. On the other hand, so-called "positive rights" are the opposite of personal responsibility. Do you have a right to health care? Of course you do, but you have to pay for it. Do you have a right to food? Yes, and you can pay for it in the self-checkout line or the line with the cashier.

What if you walk into my wig store and hand me money for a wig and I don't want to sell it to you because you are a Zoroastrian? To bad for me; I have to sell you a wig. Otherwise I'm discriminating and trampling your rights. But you don't have a right to free wigs whether or not you are a Zoroastrian. However the entitlement mentality would state that if someone wants a wig but can't pay for it then they should have a right to it. The taxpayers should pony up to make sure there is "economic justice", yet another synonym for the entitlement mentality.

We need to continue the attack the left's constant assault on our personal liberty and the true nature of the rights we have as human beings which the state recognizes and protects. The government's job is not to enumerate ever more "positive rights" to squeeze out the true freedoms and the true nature of our personal responsibilities. We also need to teach our kids this, first by throwing propaganda like The Rainbow Fish into the garbage can, then by explaining the difference in how a Christian views our rights and responsibilities as citizens and how secular leftists like Obama and Ginsburg defines them. And of course by trying to fulfill our duties and respect the true rights of others.

Hobby Lobby Decision Makes Liberal Heads Explode

You have to look at this stuff. Here are my favorite freak-outs:

Because women still have to deal with vagina-hating coots like Alito and Scalia #yesallwomen.

At least he didn't write cooter-hating coots. That would just be confusing.

I hope Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Kennedy drown in a sea of birth-control pills. #hobbylobby

I didn't realize birth control pills were liquid. Well you learn something new every day, especially if you are a misogynistic mantard like me.

Hobby Lobby to mandate employees to eat the blood and flesh imaginary jews on Sundays. #whatwillittake

There it is! Wondered when we'd hit the anti-Catholic stuff, even though the Hobby Lobby people aren't Catholic. Guy Benson has a good article on Townhall about the reflexive attacks. Excerpt:

Leave it to Harry Reid to make the cheapest argument imaginable, which naturally fails to mention that a key related ruling against the overreaching mandate at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals was handed down by Judge Janice Rogers Brown, an African American woman. It's time that our white male Senate Majority Leader stop telling black woman jurists how to do their jobs. And I, for one, "can't believe we live in a world" in which a privileged white woman [Elizabeth Warren] can shamelessly traffic in an entirely unsupportable "ethnicity" claim throughout her career, drop the pretense once she's reached the pinnacle of her profession, and still get elected to the United States Senate as an anti-privilege, populist liberal.

To find the front lines in a war with Fascists, just look for the young men in tan shirts.

So during this break from whatever He Who Shall Not Be Named is posting these days, I have been taking one of those new-fangled “MOOC” courses online from Coursera.  The course I’ve been taking is on World History since 1760, and it has been terrific.  Anyway, the course came around to the topic of fascism, and the good Prof put up a quote from Mussolini describing fascism (emphasis added by me):

Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State. And it is for the individual, in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his historical existence. It is opposed to classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, monarchies for example. And which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people. . . .

. . . . Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has Value, outside the State.

This business about the State being the conscience and will of the people, without regard for external sources such as the spiritual, especially struck me given some of the attacks on our conscience that we’ve seen lately.   We’re running headlong into fascism, or more accurately, it’s running headlong into us.  

It was reported yesterday that the ethics committee of the State Supreme Court of California has unanimously recommended a total ban on state judges volunteering for the Boy Scouts, and that a federal judge in California anonymously(?) says that this ought to be the de facto rule for both state and federal judges, even if not enacted.

(Come on, your honor. If you're on the right side of history, why anonymous?)

One has to take a step back for this to really sink in:  here we have a long-lived organization that has the stated purpose of forming young men of character and virtue, indeed with a list of virtues (unarguable virtues) as their “law”.  Yet here it is proposed, by those in charge of ensuring justice, that it ought to be UNETHICAL for a judge of a court of general jurisdiction to volunteer time toward such an organization.  This is the essence of fascist conscience formation -- never mind what your conscience previously told you (based on external sources), this is your new conscience.

And so we have a culture, backed up and encouraged by the State, acting on a daily basis to form and enforce this new “conscience and will of the people” replacing that of us foolish individuals that may be based on external sources.  Of course, the government doesn’t particularly care what this new conscience actually proscribes (remember Obama’s “evolution” on same-sex marriage), so long as the external sources are marginalized.  And of course our government is all too willing to chime in with their own proclamations of the conscience of the State, by proclaiming that debate is over on such topics as anthropogenic climate change, and government-managed health insurance (which is being implemented in the true Fascist way).  Which is reaching its logical end with the IRS scandal, Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius, and the Little Sisters of the Poor case.  (Why, all the Little Sisters have to do is sign a form -- that’s all we’re asking.  Of course, that’s all that St. Thomas More had to do, and all the Holy Maccabees had to do was eat a piece of pork.)

These are the stakes:  not only our consciences, but the right to even have an individual conscience.  Unfortunately, the battle must be joined.  It’s not a fight we picked, but it has picked us.  It doesn’t matter that the fight will be over small things that will be painted in political terms, because defeat begins with concessions on small things.  Just ask the Boy Scouts how their concession to the gay agenda a couple of years ago has worked out for them -- within the last week we’ve had Disney announce that they will no longer support their employees volunteering time for the Boy Scouts, and now this proposed ethical rule.  

Another old timer had something to say about that very thing, long long ago:

For all claims from an equal, urged upon a neighbour as commands before any attempt at legal settlement, be they great or be they small, have only one meaning, and that is slavery.

(Pericles last speech before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War -- Thucydides, I.139-146.)

And just so --  the BSA is now enslaved.  Capitulating part way not only did them no good -- it harmed them among their friends, and weakened them in front of their enemies who now demand even more.   

This is where the battles lie.  We’d best be on the lookout for how we’ll each be challenged.

And no, the "Benedict Option" is not an option.