A Steaming Pile of Obamacare Schadenfreude

Another hot day here, a muggy 80 at 8 AM under cloudy skies and without yesterday's breeze to cool it down. Uck. Fallout from the Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College cases continues.

Gullible Liberals Misread Birth-Control Ruling

Liberals should spend less time lauding the dissents in last week's Hobby Lobby decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and more time reading them. If they did, they'd notice that some of their main arguments find little support -- even from liberal justices.

President Barack Obama's administration has sought to require almost all employers that offer health insurance to cover contraceptives. The court's majority ruled that Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. and similar companies could refuse to cover contraceptives to which they have religious objections.

Many liberals say that this ruling was flawed because the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- the 1993 law the case turned on -- doesn't protect for-profit corporations. Yet only two of the justices took that view; the other two dissenters refused to endorse it.
And not one of the justices chose to question the relevant beliefs of Hobby Lobby's owners: that the contraceptives to which they object can cause human embryos to die.

Unlike many liberal commentators, all the justices grasped that whether the owners' objection has a strong evidentiary basis -- which it does -- is irrelevant to their legal claim. A government that respects religious liberty doesn't subject religious claims to such scrutiny. When the Volstead Act exempted communion wine from Prohibition, lawmakers didn't inquire about whether it really became the blood of Jesus. . .

 Without Reason or Empathy

. . .Sotomayor imagines that the court gave its blessing to the nonprofit accommodation by citing it in deciding Hobby Lobby. In reality, the court expressly disavowed that position: "We do not decide today whether an approach of this type complies with RFRA for purposes of all religious claims," wrote Justice Samuel Alito.

Logic is on the majority's side. In order to disprove the government's contention that the mandate is the least restrictive alternative, it is sufficient to establish that there is a less restrictive alternative--the nonprofit accommodation. But for the accommodation to withstand a RFRA challenge, the government would have to prove that it is the least restrictive alternative.

A superlative is harder to prove than to disprove. Disproof requires only a single inconsistent comparison, whereas proof requires showing that all comparisons are consistent. If that's too abstract, consider the following imaginary dialogue between two schoolchildren, whom we'll call Sonia and Sammy:

Sonia: "I'm the tallest kid in class."

Sammy: "No you're not. I'm taller than you."

Sonia: "Oh, so you're saying you're the tallest kid in class?"
Sammy: "Not necessarily. But--"

Sonia: "GOTCHA! YOU LIE!!!1 I'M THE TALLEST KID IN CLASS!!"

Justice Sotomayor's fallacy is precisely analogous to little Sonia's. . . .

But that's what you expect from an affirmative action hire.

From Betsy's Page:

It's amazing how much like those 19th century nativists decrying the influence of Catholics in America some liberals are sound these days as they pick out that the five justices who formed the majority in the Hobby Lobby decision are Catholics. Suddenly, Catholic-bashing is creeping into liberal analysis of Supreme Court decisions that liberals don't like. It really has been amusing to hear all these nice liberals bemoaning the use of the Religious Freedom Reformation Act when it was a law passed with near unanimity and signed into law with great self congratulation by Hillary Clinton's husband. Suddenly, liberals no longer like the idea of finding a balance between the reach of the federal government and people's individual religious beliefs if it interferes with their desired policy goals.

And all this for the goal of forcing employers to provide employees free contraceptives. It has always struck me as rather strange that that is the one prescription that the administration wants to insist should be provided at no cast to insured employees. Think of all the possible medicines that they could have chosen to be provided for free - prescriptions for heart problems, cancer, diabetes, asthma, HIV, or psychiatric treatments. But none of those were considered worthy of mandating that they be provided free of cost. Only contraceptives. Not covered with a deductible or for a certain percentage. Nope, absolutely free. I would love to have a reporter ask Obama why didn't they have similar mandates for other medical needs? I think it was all done deliberately so that they could take advantage of the opposition that they knew would arise in order to gin up their phony cries about a war on women.

Also:

Ross Douthat has a typically thoughtful column about the dangers of what would happen if liberals were successful in their push against religious groups with whom they disagree. He starts out by describing a company that liberals should be cheering.

There are, however, exceptions: companies that still have a sense of business as a moral calling, which can be held up as examples to shame the bottom-liners.
One such company was hailed last year by the left-wing policy website Demos “for thumbing its nose at the conventional wisdom that success in the retail industry” requires paying “bargain-basement wages.” A retail chain with nearly 600 stores and 13,000 workers, this business sets its lowest full-time wage at $15 an hour, and raised wages steadily through the stagnant postrecession years. (Its do-gooder policies also include donating 10 percent of its profits to charity and giving all employees Sunday off.) And the chain is thriving commercially — offering, as Demos put it, a clear example of how “doing good for workers can also mean doing good for business.”

That company is Hobby Lobby. But liberals can't cheer any more for that company because they disagree with the company's position on four contraceptives. Douthat sees the dangers if liberals have their way in their battles against such religiously motivated companies.