Today a mockery was made of the highest court in the land. Hobby Lobby was a vehicle, they were never driving this cause. This was opportunistic political posturing that song and danced its way into reality. A company that provided contraception under it’s own health plan decided to abandon that policy after the passing of the Affordable Care Act. They claim it’s because of their conveniently and recently adopted beliefs as Christians. I’m here to tell you differently: They just don’t want to.
Metaphysics and revelatory morality have no right to dictate the laws of the land. Render unto Caesar what’s his, tightly respect the document that helped found and has guided this great country. If following the words of any religious text known to man could have engendered a country as great as ours without the help of the constitution… it had thousands of years to do so. None of them did. I do not condemn having more respect for a religious text than the constitution… but if you allow that respect to overflow into areas where the constitution is the unequivocal authority.. you are not a patriot. You do not subscribe to democracy. You are not an upholder of what people have fought and died for. You are a theocrat. You are a proponent of your own Sharia. You are an exclusionist and you fail to grasp the division of church and state that has allowed our nation to flourish. The word ‘religious’ before ‘belief’ does not exempt it from scrutiny, circumspection, or the equitability we strive for as a country.
That being said this isn’t entirely about religion or the texts those that count themselves as such ascribe to. Nobody acts a certain way because a book tells them to. Nobody does anything because a book tells them to. It didn’t work for Mark David Chapman and it shouldn’t have worked for Hobby Lobby. People take action because they are free moral agents with the choice to do so. We are responsible for our decisions, we are responsible for our actions. Not the words we cite in defense of them. You can’t get away with stoning your wife and neighbor for sleeping together because it’s a sincerely held religious belief. Lawyers can’t cite levitical law. It’s indefensible.
When someone says ‘I don’t think I should have to follow the same laws as everyone else because of a sincerely held religious belief’.. They are cowering. They are giving an excuse. They are speaking in ways that may fly on the front porch with polite company on a Sunday afternoon. They are speaking in ways that have no credence in a court of law. They are molesting the most admirable work of human political understanding to ever grace a piece of parchment. This is deception. They may as well be saying ‘because I don’t want to’. That’s the root. A company just circumvented the law and made a mockery of the greatest court in our nation… because they wanted to.