Some Thoughts on Hobby Lobby and Why Liberals Fail at America

Now that the long holiday weekend is over, it's back to work. That meant I had a full day today, so no time for blogging until now. I haven't blogged much here on the Hobby Lobby case.

If you go over to Brad's post on that case,I probably wrote more over there than I have over here. In any event, I've covered the legal aspects of the case over there, and I don't really care to rehash that aspect. What I've been mulling over the weekend was the absolute freakout that the left had over the decision. Frankly, it doesn't seem that earth-shattering to me. What really puzzled me was all the hair-pulling, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. I saw all that and thought....really? Um, ok.

It puzzled me that people are aghast to discover a law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) protects religious freedom. The whole reason you pass a law like this is to protect religious freedom and give them accommodations. That's the whole point. But then, this upcoming point was made on Ace's podcast, and it bears repeating here, on this much less frequented corner of the internet, because it clarifies the issue.

The whole point of RFRA is to make special provisions, and to make accommodations with different beliefs. Because normally, the majority of a group finds it annoying to have to make these accommodations.

Accordingly, we passed a law about it - the RFRA. For instance: If a guy at your job site is a Muslim, then he may have to take a break three times a day to pray to Mecca. Obviously, not everyone gets this break. The rest of you guys have to keep digging the ditch. But to get along with the Muslim guy and be tolerant, we've decided, with RFRA, that we are going to respect that this guy has a belief system that isn't what everyone else's belief system is. Therefore, we're going to cut him some slack from the general rule that you don't get three breaks a day to pray in the direction of Mecca.

And for the most part, liberals are seeming fine with some of these special exceptions. But as soon as you have just one special exception that goes against their belief system, they want to crush people and impose their will on them. And then when you point out that the law also protects this religious group, all the liberals start yelling: "What the hell!, Now we're making laws for EVERY SINGLE RELIGIOUS GROUP?? It's going to be like ANARCHY here!" Well....that's kind of what the law says. What did you think the law said?

And that goes into the main point: One of the things that most people think was a good quality in liberals is that they wanted to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. I did. I kind of thought that it was a good thing that liberals at least thought about that problem a lot. They always seemed worried about a small group getting steamrolled by the conventions of the larger group.

But...it turns out that liberals don't really think about that. They don't really care about small groups having their own little exceptions if it the small group isn't part of their voting coalition. It was never about principle for liberals. For them, it's purely a transactional process for members of their voting coalition. LIberals are not fighting about the principle of the minority, because when it gets extended to a Christian, they're aghast, and they want to overturn the RFRA. They don't believe in the principle of protecting this religious minority. This whole thing has been very revealing for me.

I've seen liberals basically say that they don't support pluralism of viewpoints in general. They support specific exceptions and accommodations for people in their voting coalition - and that's it. It's not that liberals are principled and good people, they've just decided to do favors for people who vote like them.

And I hear these liberals say, If only these trouble-making Hobby Lobby Christians could be could be forced, somehow coerced by the government, to behave properly, then we wouldn't have these problems!

They fail at America.