I think I'm done here. If this is the type of intellectual pretzel-twisting the left is now willing to indulge in order to avoid conceding a point, maybe there's nothing left to do except to watch the clouds and listen for the trumpets. What's next? I would bring up pleading for mercy for dudes who murdered their parents because now they're orphans, but
we've already been there.
I don't know who Amanda Davis is, and I don't know if this is her in the photo or just her tweeting a photo of someone else. But I get no sense from the tweet that she offers the photo with the slightest awareness of irony. She really thinks this is a winning point.
Really.
I've been watching the rhetoric from some of my liberal friends in the past few days as the Hobby Lobby arguments go forward - particularly the ones who have bees in their bonnets about Christianity and any intersection that occurs between government and faith.
For the most part, every point is focused on the idea that, if Hobby Lobby wins, it would allow employers to "impose their religion" on employees. They don't even make much attempt to rationalize the tiny detail where it's the use of the employer's money to pay for the employer's moral choices that's at issue here.
If I was a liberal trying to defend this point, I guess I would say that once you've established a system in which everyone depends on employer-paid coverage, it therefore becomes discrimination or the imposition of religion for the employer to decide what will and will not be covered, because the employee has no choice but to depend on the insurance and on the employer to provide it.
Of course, that breaks down along all kinds of factual and rational lines.
The employee only depends on the employer for insurance because of a system created by the government during World War II and doubled down on by ObamaCare.
The employee can always get a job somewhere else. That's not the type of "uniformity" that Elena Kagan prefers, but for the individual in question, it would solve the problem just fine.
The employee can always take the cash money she receives from the employer in the form of a paycheck and use some of it to buy her own pills. They're $9 a month at Target.
And in terms of government policy, what you've done here is essentially turn private companies into public utilities insofar as you are forcing them to provide things to employees that are entirely apart from their business missions, and quite possibly contrary to their own values as individuals who own the businesses.
To this, liberals argue that corporations can't be afforded the
rights that you would afford to individuals. What that means is that your individual rights no longer apply once you decide to own and operate a business. That raises an interesting question: If your rights as an individual don't apply in your role as
employer, then why do
employees' rights apply completely in
that role?
The obvious solution to the sign-waver's problem here is this: Don't ask me to pay for your birth control, and it will therefore be none of my business. Totally up to you.
