By DEXTER DUGGAN
It was nic
These were the sorts of people who actually “built it” in classic American achievement stories, without Barack Obama claiming to be responsible for their business success or having control over their souls.
Of course, Obama had thought it was his nosy business to batter their souls into line with his iron-fisted mandates. If the Greens had failed to offer even one of 20 “contraceptive” methods in employee health-insurance coverage, including abortifacients, their company would have been fined nearly a half-billion dollars a year! A bankrupting fact that didn’t receive much attention in Obama-fawning media coverage.
This is totalitarian Obama on the march to crush disagreement. Obama’s hobbyhorse is “family planning,” and if it’s another step toward Communist China’s corrupt compulsion, that’s no coincidence. The Chinese people mainly aren’t Catholics, and neither are the Greens and Hahns, but Big Government tramples families without regard to religion.
However, the Supreme Court, by actually following the law instead of inventing it, specifically saw that the Greens, of Hobby Lobby, and Hahns, of Conestoga Wood Specialties, were well within their rights under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA).
To scornful media, the Greens and Hahns may have seemed a return to an earlier America when more families regularly went to worship on the weekend and tried to follow the moral rules throughout the week. An American back then who was told that he’d be required to pay for strangers’ abortifacients as a workplace requirement would have thought he’d been stealthily transplanted to Soviet Moscow.
The past wasn’t, of course, a perfect time. No earthly time ever has been. Little kids disobeyed then, too, and had to be chastised. Let’s listen in.
“Ruthie, I need to remind you again to do your homework.”
“No, Mommy. We need to talk about Johnny being a bad boy.”
“If you don’t do your homework, Ruthie, your teacher will keep sending me notes about your being unprepared for class. Yes, I’ll speak to your brother about his being a bad boy, but right now we’ve got to talk about your English essays that, I’m sorry to say, never even get to the point.”
“But, Mommy, I think I should write what I please. That should be good enough. Why’s it so wrong to write about what I like, no matter what Teacher says?”
Did Ruthie grow up to be Washington Post real-life liberal opinion writer Ruth Marcus?
On July 1 Marcus spent an entire opinion column attacking the previous day’s High Court ruling for the Greens and Hahns without once mentioning the essential RFRA or abortifacients. Sort of like writing about some history of California without mentioning Spanish explorers.
By avoiding RFRA, Marcus skipped over having to explain that liberal Democrat President Bill Clinton signed RFRA into law in 1993 after it passed almost unanimously — both Democrats and Republicans — in Congress. Acknowledging this fact, in turn, would have raised the uncomfortable issue for Marcus of how radically the Democratic Party has transformed itself in 21 years, into a fierce foe of traditional religious liberty and belief.
Marcus repeatedly, however, mentioned contraception in her column, nicely accommodating the intentionally misleading liberal media line that the Greens and Hahns oppose birth control, and that’s supposedly what the Supreme Court case was about, denying women “contraception.”
In this context, “denying” is defined as failing to make somebody else pay for your perks. Just like the government “denies” you a night on the town by failing to pay for your nightclub bills.
Libertarian-conservative pundit Ross Kaminsky mocked this media distortion with a June 30 post at The American Spectator, writing that it’s from “the ‘I bet you didn’t know this after watching NBC News’ files: Hobby Lobby’s health insurance plans already cover most popular forms of birth control — those used by the vast majority of Americans who use birth control.
“In fact,” Kaminsky continued, “Hobby Lobby covers 16 of the 20 FDA-approved contraceptive methods. The Green family, which owns the chain of arts-and-crafts supplies stores, says they intend to continue to cover those 16 forms of birth control even after winning the court case.”
Nor had they ever claimed otherwise. Their objection, now vindicated, was and is to abortifacients.
In her “contraception” opinion column, Marcus instead devoted close attention to an unrelated recent High Court decision on — huh? — cell phones. Was her strategy to present herself as such a comprehensive analyst that she even could discern relationships between pills and phones — all the while ignoring the pertinent law and facts in the religious-conscience ruling?
One recalls the attorney aphorism, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”
Marcus is lucky she wasn’t arrested for aggravated assault against the table.
Joining in the deception, Hillary Clinton — she who is impoverished factually and otherwise — was heard on radio news saying the Supreme Court result means people “can deny women the right to contraception.”
Politico.com showed Clinton blundering along on June 30, saying a woman “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.”
The Politico report said Clinton acknowledged husband Bill having signed RFRA into law, but she thought that was just about things like a church or synagogue getting a zoning approval.
Well, getting a government permit sometimes is the right thing. A doctor needs to have a license to practice. If he prefers to commit malpractice, he can lose his license and livelihood. Same for an auto mechanic whose deficient work puts dangerously unsafe vehicles back on the road.
And what about pundits like Marcus and politicians like Hillary? Shouldn’t these erring folks have to get a license to practice? Nah. Leave them free to embarrass themselves silly like this. That should be warning enough to the public to avoid their contaminated goods. Just think of it as contraception against bad arguments.
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