The Three Other, Bigger Issues about the Hobby Lobby Decision
That Nobody is Talking About
The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision is well on its way to
dividing further a country that is fast approaching a breaking point. A great number of people applaud the decision
as a win for religious freedom, and another great number of people are disappointed,
no, angry at the decision for what they see as doing more harm than what such so-called
religious freedom is worth. I won’t try
to figure out here which great number is greater or even try to show which side
I think is really in the best interests of the country.
There are bigger issues here at stake. At least three.
1) What law
exactly was Hobby Lobby trying to get out from complying with? The Affordable Care Act? Well, not exactly. The mandate for employers to have their
insurance providers supply free contraceptives to their employees was not a
part of the Affordable Care Act. This
mandate was added by the Department of Health and Human Services.
That means that this part of the law was never discussed,
debated, or voted on by elected representatives in Congress. But you may say, a lot of governmental
departments make rules and regulations that are binding on the people of the
country.
Well, that’s precisely the problem. There are regulations, and there are
laws. I don’ think the Supreme Court
would hear a case about a regulation.
This mandate is commonly touted as the law of the land.
But the Constitution of the United States, in the very first
sentence says that: “All legislative
Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which
shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
The Constitution spells out in Article 1 Section 8 the
powers of the Congress, and at the end of that section it basically repeats
that first line: Congress has the power “[t]o
make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution
the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the
Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
All laws are to be made by Congress. But you say that would require way too much
time and knowledge for our representatives to be able to do. That’s why they created all these agencies to
run things for them. But this would not
be necessary if the Congress limited itself to the powers expressly given to it
by the Constitution in the first place.
But you may say that the writers of the Constitution couldn’t
foresee the kinds of issues that would surface two hundred years later. The fact is that they knew that, and that is
why they established a means by which the Constitution could be amended.
But through neglect, ignorance, wilful abuse of power,
wilful abdication of power, or a wilful grab of power, Congress has allowed
other people and agencies to exert power that belonged solely to them. By assuming far more duties than the
Constitution allotted to them in the first place, they delegated some of those
duties to people and agencies which they had no right to do.
I believe the Supreme Court should have based their decision
entirely on the fact that this was not in fact a law, but a regulation from a department
that transcended its Constitutional powers.
2) The second
other, bigger issue in this case is that suddenly the people of the United
States have been granted a new human right.
There are at least two problems here.
Rights as originally understood by our Founders as in the Declaration
of Independence attributes our rights as endowments from God. They precede government and make our present
form of government possible, because our form of government is a natural result
of those rights.
But this right to free contraceptive is a new right, granted
to us by the largess of our government.
As such, it contributes to and solidifies the trend in modern thinking
that rights come from government. That
court called supreme which ultimately runs our country rules that our
government must be entirely neutral on matters of religion, which essentially
has meant that anything relating to the idea of God must be excluded from
government decision making, except of course for those practices that are
merely symbolic and traditional.
So any thought of rights being given to us by God had to be
downplayed, because that has a strong resemblance to a statement of
theology. So more and more rights are
being seen as under the jurisdiction of the government. And what the government can give, the
government can take away.
Now if the government can make laws that regulate and
control the lives of its constituents, then our rights can and will gradually
diminish as government works to ‘improve’ our lives and society.
The second problem here is the idea of a right. Originally rights as outlined in the Bill of
Rights were all things that you could do or that the government could not do to
you. Now we have a whole new idea of
rights, foreign to our country as designed and foreign to what our country has
always been.
Now rights are seen as things that are owed to people,
things that people should have, as in must be provided with, just because they
are human beings here.
In two short years, women now have the right to free
contraceptives. Anybody who thinks this
is not a good idea is branded as a hater of women. If you are a politician, you better be able
to explain your case very well and have a lot of opportunities to do so, or
your political future is in serious trouble.
This whole issue of rights has become a valuable tool for
one of our major political parties, because they are the party of yes to any
and all new rights, because government is then seen as the Great Benefactor and
their party as the party of compassion.
And people then as always vote for the party that gives them the most
benefits. Which leads to the third
other, bigger issue in this case.
3) When people
have rights, as in things to which they are entitled and which must be given to
them, then it means that somebody else is paying for it. Now there is this idea of a social contract
that many people see as the idea behind society, where everyone has certain
obligations to the group as a whole and to other members of the group.
This is where you need to step back and see the bigger
picture. When our country still embraced
a Christian worldview and didn’t shrink from acknowledging God throughout our society,
including schools and government, there was a very high rate of volunteerism,
as people rallied around those in need.
But as our nation moved to secularism, due to several rulings by that
court called supreme, the government assumed most of the responsibility for social
needs and volunteerism dropped.
As the role of government expanded and continues to expand,
the cost of running all these programs continues to climb, to the point that a
large portion of government expenditures are paid for with borrowed money,
which as anybody can tell you, unless you are in government, always costs more
than if you paid in cash.
But it might be argued, contraceptive costs are not borne by
the government but by insurance companies.
But insurance company premiums are like government taxes. You pay for things you don’t usually see the
direct benefit of. The costs keep going
higher, and this is money that is taken out of the private economy and dampens
the economy and job markets. Government
employees do well as do insurance company employees, but this is an economic
drag on everybody else.
But it is said that contraceptive costs saves the insurance
company in the long run, because they will have less claims in the future due
to the expenses of having a child. Yet
without a constant influx of new children, the population ages, and the more
expensive costs associated with an aging population are borne by a shrinking group
of everybody else, as are the costs of all these new rights.
There is a name given to a form of government that aims to
provide for the needs of all of its citizens and relies on everybody else
paying for it. The name doesn’t mean a
lot to the younger generation today, because, well, it just isn’t used too much
anymore. The name has gone out of common
use, because it was considered a major failure, though there are still ardent
advocates of it today.
The name is communism.
Basically the idea is to give to people according to their need and take
from the others according to their ability.
This was the system of the Soviet Union where a common joke was: we
pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.
A system of government or society where the responsibility
of providing for one’s needs is essentially removed from the individual and
placed on the government was found to be contrary to human nature. Those who produced a lot produced less, and
those who worked less worked even less.
I see some of this quite often at work where people are discouraged from
working extra hours, because the amount of their pay that goes to the government
is then proportionately and noticeably higher.
So in an effort purportedly to help people, though the
cynically minded among us see it merely as a ploy to buy votes, the harm to the
society as a whole to me is larger than any perceived gains.
We are giving up the responsibility of making the laws that
affect us and giving it to people that were not elected by us and are not
answerable to us. We are confirming the
thinking that our rights come from the government, and as such government has
the right to restrict our rights for reasons they don’t need to explain to
us. And it keeps raising the cost of government
and everything else ultimately such that our prosperity is lost in the name of
security and comfort.
