Hobby Lobby thoughts

[marta_bee]

The gang over at Facebook got me talking about the recent "Hobby Lobby" case, and I promised an explanation of why I disagreed with the decision. Not necessarily as a lawyer; I'm not one, though I play one on TV hang around quite a few and try to listen to what they say. Still, this is less about what the law allows and more about how I think

Comments

[marta_bee]

Please understand that I'm saying this as an American-who-understands-how-(some)-Americans-think, not someone who agrees with it. :-) I agree with you, the current system is messed up. (I could use stronger language.) It is inefficient and frustrating and inhumane.

But I think there are a couple of things going on. Perhaps more than anything, there's a lot of fear that there's not enough healthcare to go around. There's this idea you see that if we give healthcare to everyone then there won't be the same standard or even quantity of care available for me and those people I care most specifically for. (Which... yeah, I could go into how messed up that is, particularly from a Christian perspective, but I won't.) There's also a fear, I think, that "those people" (whomever they are) want to take what I (whoever I am) have earned, and that the government is interested in spreading the wealth around. I do see where that fear comes from because American history is so built on competing groups with their competing grudges, it's the melting pot syndrome. But I think there is a fear that some people are lazy and moochers and will take away services from the people who have earned them and deserve them and that you care most about receiving them. The whole idea of the rugged individualist providing for his own family is really woven into the American psyche, and I think a lot of people find it very unsettling to think that they are simultaneously responsible for people in general and subject to society's wellbeing as a whole. It goes against this idea that we can and should take care of ourselves.

(God, sometimes I hate this country. Really. I want the stability and experience necessary to maybe emigrate to a sane society, like Canada or the UK or Germany. But that's a conversation for another day, I think.)

Playing Devil's Advocate for a moment, I think that people in favor of Hobby Lobby et al would point out that they aren't saying those employees don't have a right to birth control; what they are denying is that they, the insurance-providers, have an obligation to fund it. And on some level I can appreciate that point, because there are things that I believe are wrong not only for me to do but for me to enable other people to do. For instance, if I think it's wrong to drink excessively (I do), I would think it's wrong to do that myself - but also to do something that enabled someone else to do that, like just giving money rather than offering to buy food for the panhandler I've seen drunk in my neighborhood. So working within the framework of Hobby Lobby's value system, if I believed using a drug that kept an embryo from implanting was a kind of murder, I would think it would be immoral to use the drug but also to be part of the chain of events that let someone else use it.

That's why I think it's so important that it's not the company owners paying for the health care, it's the corporations (who in this case at least have no religious identity so no religion their employers would expect would impact their actions). Of course it would be much better to have NHS-style healthcare availability for everyone where you just were expected to pay your taxes and there was no greenlighting of what health services particular employees needed. More freedom for all IMO, to say nothing of better outcomes. But that seems like a fool's hope in these fifty states.

... but I'm rambling. I haven't eaten all day and suspect I need to before I make any kind of sense. :-)

[azalaisdep]

Playing Devil's Advocate for a moment, I think that people in favor of Hobby Lobby et al would point out that they aren't saying those employees don't have a right to birth control; what they are denying is that they, the insurance-providers, have an obligation to fund it.

And I do, bizarrely, have some sympathy with how it might feel to directly be funding something which you actively believe is harmful. Which goes right back to why healthcare for employees shouldn't be the direct financial responsibility of employers but should be universally funded through taxation. Let's face it, we all pay for things via taxation that we'd rather not (I imagine plenty of American taxpayers would rather not be funding military adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq, for starters...) but there's a distance to it because we don't actually have the choice to opt out.

The point about the rugged pioneer mentality is I think probably the UK cliche assumption about Americans - so it's interesting to have it confirmed! I think over here that mindset tends to be associated with Mrs Thatcher's famous "there is no such thing as society" quote, which is still perceived as an excuse for appalling social division, inequality and callous I'm-all-right-Jackism - we do still have a notion of society as a whole, just about...