You may have heard that the left is having a hissy fit due to the Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case. In fact a number of cases lately have gone against the administration of The Chicago Jesus™ such that the left is having a spasm of terror and angst that their drive to destroy the American system might be in doubt. One must of course remain determined and cautiously optimistic that this is the case in order to continue the fight to protect and defend the values that make America the unique and amazing country that it has been and, with luck, will be again. In the meantime we continue to push back against the leviathan wherever we can.
At the most basic level the court held that Obama-Fuhrer-Care constitutes the imposition of a religion with respect to its blind requirement that small businesses provide Obama mandated birth control methods regardless of that business’s specific religious beliefs. The left apparently did not consider that this would not even have been an issue if Obama and the left didn’t insist on pushing their religious beliefs into our bedrooms whether we wanted them or not. Thus the court found that the solution to their religious bigotry (the bigotry of the left that is) was to get their sexually obsessed paws out of our bedrooms and our wallets. The court held that Hobby Lobby did not have to provide those methods of birth control that were in conflict with the religious beliefs of the owners. That is to say, business owners have 1st Amendment rights and the court upheld them. The left is going apoplectic because this upsets their perfectly planned utopia in which all are equally miserable and dominated by the leviathan state.
For this is one of the most important things you must understand about the left. They do not allow you to opt out. They speak endlessly about choice and tolerance, but the only choices they allow you are the ones that they approve. They are tolerant only of those views that they espouse. Their vision of the perfect Utopian society does not grant choice because that would disturb their carefully crafted vision. The left’s perfect society is one wherein the self-selected elites make all decisions and manage all outcomes. There can be no room for individual choice or action; no space for individual dreams and hopes. The all-powerful state governs all hopes, dreams, plans and choices. There can be no room for variance in the perfectly planned society. No, every square centimeter of your life must be under their control lest society become a whirlwind of chaos and unplanned outcomes.
It is a leftist point of view, which is incorrect of course, that rights derive from statutes. They do not. No law written by congress or upheld by the courts can grant rights. Rights, by which we mean individual rights, are granted by God, or natural law if you like. They are a priori; that is, they precede any deductions we make about how they are to be applied. They exist prior to and are above any simple law that we can write. Thus all laws must logically be subordinate to these rights. Therefore the Bill of rights does not grant rights; it recognizes them. It acknowledges their a priori existence that cannot be removed or legitimately revoked.
When the left complains about the court in the manner we see here, what they are really saying is that they are concerned that the courts might deviate from the leftist view of manufactured “rights” that we have seen in the last century and return to the more traditional view of rights that I mention above. For the last century progressives of the left have sought to undermine the traditional understanding of natural rights as derived from natural law, an understanding that goes back centuries, in favor of the leftist re-definition of rights as created by statute that we have seen only since the inception of the leftist attack on the American system. The reasons for this are obvious. If rights can be mass produced on a leftist assembly line like so many cans of soup, then the real rights that we have had can be slowly undermined and devalued like a disintegrating currency. The left complains here because they recognize that the courts, however imperfectly, are acknowledging this older and more philosophically sound conception of natural rights as derived from a higher order and inviolate with respect to the leftist’s desire to re-design society to better fit their Utopian plans. The left complains that the court ignores precedent, but only the more recent precedent that serves the leftist agenda and not the more ancient understanding of rights as inalienable, on which our system is founded.
