HUMPHRIES: Liberal Bully of the Week

OPINION:

The Supreme Court handed Hobby Lobby a 5-4 victory over Obamacare’s contraception mandates on Monday, causing the entire liberal world to go absolutely insane. The decision was portrayed as the end of birth control, an attack on women’s rights and the launch of a theocracy — as though the court has just installed Islamic Shariah law in America. (Funny how the people screaming about that also get angry at those who criticize actual Shariah law.)

You could say the entire left unmasked itself as award-winning bullies with this hysterical overreaction, because it was mostly disappointment that the sincere religious believers who own Hobby Lobby didn’t get crushed. This was a spectator sport for liberals. The people losing their minds don’t work for Hobby Lobby and wouldn’t have any trouble getting birth control even if they did, because Hobby Lobby still provides coverage for 16 types of contraceptives, and the four types they objected to paying for — because they can be seen as abortion drugs — are easy to come by.

The point of this whole case was to smash the owners of Hobby Lobby to the ground and make them take a knee before the almighty state. Obamacare is a set of 10,000 commandments, and they’re much more important than the mere 10 commandments Moses brought down from a mountain, or whatever else those silly old religious nuts believe. Since liberals didn’t get their big emotional catharsis by claiming victory over the Christians, they’ll settle for a huge emotional freakout about the supposed triumph of woman-hating fanatics. It all makes for a very nice diversion from everything else going on with the Obama administration.

If I’ve got to pick one lucky recipient for Liberal Bully of the Week, I’ll go with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She sits on the highest court in the land, so she should have known better than to write the high-strung dissenting opinion she hammered out. It puts a respectable face on the hysteria sweeping across the left. When they need to pump the gas on their outrage machine to get their voters to the polls in November, they’ll be quoting from the Ginsburg dissent.

There’s a lot that Justice Ginsburg deliberately gets wrong in her dissent. For example, she warned that the Hobby Lobby decision means “commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

That’s the exact opposite of what Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion actually says. This case was all about holding up the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which passed the Senate 93-0 in 1993, with support from big liberal names like Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and, yes, Harry Reid, who is now running around and saying “it’s time that five men on the Supreme Court stop deciding what happens to women.” The RFRA was signed into law by Hillary Clinton’s husband, who was president at the time.

Justice Alito made it clear that this ruling was actually quite narrow. It only applies to “closely held” companies — mostly family businesses, such as Hobby Lobby, which was built up from a mom-and-pop garage operation. Justice Alito clearly stated that corporations cannot just opt out of any law they claim a religious exception to. The RFRA has always said, and still says, that the playing field is tilted heavily in favor of the government. Religious objections face some very steep challenges before they’re validated, the way Hobby Lobby’s objection to Obamacare was.

There’s an important part of Justice Ginsburg’s dissent where she says the only organizations that should enjoy any protection for religious conscience are those which “exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith.” In other words, churches and temples, and not for-profit companies run by people of faith. That’s a slap in the face to religious charities, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of celibate nuns that has also challenged the Obamacare mandates. It’s really a slap in the face to everyone, because she’s saying you give up your conscience when you form a company, even a very closely held one. If big government orders you to pay for things you find morally unacceptable, you don’t get to argue or refuse — you get on your knees and pull out your checkbook.

That’s like a satire of what the Constitution says, and what America’s Founders thought about freedom of speech. Inalienable rights aren’t something you have to fight a last-ditch battle against ambitious politicians and bureaucrats to keep. For giving liberal hysterics a flag they can rally around, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is our Bully of the Week.

Rusty Humphries, a nationally syndicated talk-radio host, is a contributor to The Washington Times.