ah wtf they did. literally burn hobby lobby to the ground

— HIGH MPREG PRIESTESS (@witchqueenloki) June 30, 2014

We are like 5 yrs from the Handmaid’s Tale.Time to act #BoycottHobbyLobby

— Nancy Lee Grahn (@NancyLeeGrahn) June 30, 2014

Just so you know, here is what the Hobby Lobby ruling means, in plain English, courtesy of law professor Eugene Volokh. Excerpt (emphases in the original)

This sort of accommodation is what Congress has mandated.When both the government’s compelling interests and religious objectors’ religious beliefs can be adequately accommodated, Congress said (in enacting RFRA) that they should be accommodated.

But Congress also said that these decisions must turn on the facts of each exemption request, and the options available for accommodating such accommodation requests. In future cases — for instance, ones involving race discrimination in employment, or insurance coverage for vaccination or blood transfusions — the result might be different.

It might not be possible in those cases (as it is in this case) to adequately accommodate both the government interests and the religious objections. If that’s so, then those religious exemptions would not have to be granted. Wisely or not, Congress has required courts to sort through religious exemption requests, granting some and denying others. This is what the Supreme Court has done here.

I’m having a hell of a time reconciling Volokh’s description of the ruling with the unshirted hysteria emerging from the cultural left in the wake of this ruling. It’s a massive freakout. The Hobby Lobby ruling only says that under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the government has to go the extra mile to accommodate religious objectors to one of its policies — but if that can’t be done, then religious objectors lose. In this case, it would have been relatively easy to protect the religious objections of Hobby Lobby’s owners, while still achieving full contraceptive coverage (as opposed to Hobby Lobby’s current health care plan, which pays for 16 of the 20 contraceptive methods approved by the FDA).

But that’s not good enough. Any restriction on sexual expression at any time is tyranny, according to the Jacobin sexual revolutionaries. As I said when this case was first argued:

Relatively few Americans oppose contraception, but those that do generally have very strong reasons for doing so. Buying a month’s worth of birth-control pills can cost anywhere between $19 and $162, depending on where you buy them and what kind you get. In Massachusetts, Planned Parenthood sells them for $30 — that’s one dollar per day, for the Pill.

This is an unreasonable burden for employees? The government has a compelling interest in forcing private businesses to provide a service that they believe isintrinsically evil (if they’re Catholics faithful to the Church’s teaching)? Really? As I said, I don’t share the Catholic Church’s view on birth control, but I know many sincere Catholics who do, and it seems to me a grave violation of religious freedom to compel them to cooperate with this policy, especially given that the cost of providing oneself with contraception is so low.

If religious liberty is meaningful, it has to apply to people whose religion you don’t like — Catholics and Evangelicals as well as Native American followers of traditional religion. After all, as the reader who sent this Bazelon essay to me wrote, doesn’t the government have a “compelling interest” in banning peyote?

What’s really at issue here is the belief that when the Sexual Revolution clashes with religious faith, the Sexual Revolution must always win. The sexual and the secular have become sacred. As we see over and over again, for many contemporary liberals, when it comes to opposing sexual freedom, religion’s error has no rights — not even the right to be wrong.

The contempt for religious liberty on the left makes me scared for the future. People forget that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed almost unanimously by Congress in 1993 as a response to a Supreme Court decision that upheld the firing of two Native American men fired by their employer after the employer discovered they had used peyote as part of a religious ceremony. Even the ACLU supported the RFRA then. Not now, it seems. 

For the contemporary left, sexual freedom is the most important freedom. National Review, in an admirably sober editorial pointing out how narrow this ruling is, and that Congress is free to amend or repeal the RFRA, observed:

It can be safely predicted that any change in birth rates and rates of contraceptive use based on this ruling will be undetectable. All that has changed is that employers are a little freer to refuse to engage in conduct they consider religiously objectionable. That this increase in freedom makes some people so very upset tells us more about them than about the Court’s ruling.

Yes it does. And if the left goes into thermonuclear pants-crapping mode over a relatively minor ruling like this, heaven help us if SCOTUS grants the country anything short of an unlimited constitutional right of gays to marry. Any protection given to religious objectors, no matter how modest, will be treated as the precursor to the establishment of the fundagelical caliphate.

By the way, I hope the FBI pays visits this week to every single person who advocated arson against Hobby Lobby because of this Supreme Court decision. Here’s a helpful list to get them started. 

UPDATE: From Robert George’s comment on the decision, this graf on why there is no “compelling interest” in forcing employers to provide contraceptive coverage:

Countless employers of fewer than fifty fulltime workers are relieved of the requirement to provide insurance to their employees under the ACA altogether, and many millions of other employees are in “grandfathered” plans unaffected by this HHS mandate. They are not required to provide coverage for contraceptives or abortifacients. For the whole of history, before Obamacare was signed into law only four years ago, no company in the United States was required to provide coverage for these products. So the Obama administration is hardly in a position to say that the provision of abortion drugs or devices, or coverage including them, constitutes a compelling governmental interest. Indeed, one wonders how the government’s attorneys could make that claim with a straight face.

So today, thanks to SCOTUS, we are back to where we were four years ago.

UPDATE.2: Damon Linker says that genuine liberals ought to be pleased with yesterday’s decision:

Will women who happen to work for that exempted church, business, or corporation be adversely impacted? Yes, they will. But by how much? At a time when contraception is relatively inexpensive and the vast majority of people living in poverty can afford to own microwaves, televisions, and cell phones, I’m willing to wager that in most cases the burden will be relatively slight. Especially because Hobby Lobby also already covers 16 of the 20 forms of contraception included in the mandate, objecting only to those it considers to be abortifacients.

To which many liberals will passionately object: Why should even a single woman have to endure any extra burden at all when it comes to her reproductive health?

That’s a fair question.

Here’s the properly liberal answer: Because we live in a world, and in a country, in which some people (including some women) disagree with your vision of the good — and you don’t always get to use government coercion to force them to act in ways that violate their beliefs.

The mere fact that some of our fellow citizens hold and sometimes act on traditionalist religious and moral views is not a sign of impending tyranny. Just as an inconvenience suffered by women who work for businesses owned and run by traditionalists isn’t evidence of incipient fascism.

Read the whole thing. Linker’s point is that a decision like yesterday’s is messy, and doesn’t leave everyone fully satisfied, but it strikes a compromise that makes it possible for people who believe very different things to live together — and that makes it a liberal decision, in the best sense.

I particularly like the point Linker makes about how sexuality is deeply woven into the fabric of Christian belief, so that a Christian can plausibly argue that something like providing abortifacient contraception is a genuine violation of conscience, whereas something like racial discrimination, the sanctioning of which is not part of Christian Scripture and theological tradition (which is not to say some Christians over history haven’t believed so), would not be taken seriously by the courts. This is something that so many contemporary Americans find impossible to understand, because (I think) our concept of what religion is has been so thoroughly hollowed out by consumerism and the pop-culture catechesis of an erotomaniacal age.

UPDATE.3: Reader Charles writes:

All the “you don’t get to tell me how to spend my salary” and “you don’t get to force me to share your beliefs” talk is ridiculous. Hobby Lobby sought an accommodation from HHS in which they would increase compensation to make up for any employee having to purchase one of the four omitted forms of birth control out of pocket. HHS said no. So, seriously, people want to argue that it’s Hobby Lobby being unreasonable? When they offered to increase cash compensation across the board – which the employees could then use to buy whatever they wanted – rather than sponsor the objectionable insurance plans? I suggest that if you think that is the action of an unreasonable employer, you’re bringing your own prejudices to the table – that this is less about finding a pluralistic solution that we can all live with than it is about punishing those with whom you disagree and pummeling their beliefs out of existence. Or, alternatively, on the part of HHS it was probably just blind bureaucratic inertia, the complete inability to fathom or process anything outside the lines.