Hobby Lobby Hysteria

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act cannot compel a closely-held corporation to subsidize employees' contraceptives if doing so violates its members' religious beliefs.

The decision outrages me because, once again, it turns the Constitution on its head and presumes that the federal government may do anything not specifically prohibited, either by the Bill of Rights or, in this case, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. As I've explained at some length, the federal government may do nothing unless the Constitution specifically allows it, and there is NO enumerated power to compel subsidies of other people's health care in general or sexual habits in particular. The ruling is an insult because it returns only a speck of the massive liberty stolen from us by the Affordable Care Act, a law that remains unconstitutional regardless of any approval by the Court (which is only a branch of the federal government and thus inferior to the Constitution). To argue that the federal government can or should be the final arbiter of its own powers is to attack every noble impulse that went into founding this country, and yet this is the pernicious doctrine we are told is our duty to embrace.

Even if the Affordable Care Act were a state law and thus not limited in the same manner as federal legislation, it would remain every bit as repugnant. Family planning is a matter of personal responsibility; if you don't want children, then do what is necessary to avoid having them and leave me out of it. It is not the legitimate role of any government in a (supposedly) free society to force others to subsidize your lifestyle. And if you still want someone else to pay for your contraception, there is only one legitimate way to do it -- persuasion. Your needs are not rights; get over it.

Which brings us to the shrill, hysterical denunciations by the dissenting Justices and many in the media. They are outraged that in the wake of the Court's ruling federal power to pillage and plunder is not total, and that some citizens can "opt out" of this imperial mandate. Such people have no right to call themselves Americans, let alone Justices. Righteous outrage belongs to us, not them, for we are all entitled to opt out of a law that is unconstitutional, null, and void.  To the extent we hear the same tired argument that a corporation is not a human being and has no rights, this is a red herring and completely irrelevant -- the burden is on you to explain what gives you the right to plunder, not on a corporation to explain why it shouldn't be plundered. You have no legal or moral leg to stand on. 

Besides, Obama already has opted out of this so-called law by unilaterally tinkering with it and postponing several of its deadlines, and I have detected no outrage whatsoever about that. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. The rule of law binds both the government and the governed, so if the government is disregarding this one, we have every reason to do so as well.