Amy Hall: why is there outrage over the Hobby Lobby ruling?

Here’s staff apologist Amy Hall over on the Stand to Reason blog.

Excerpt:

I’ve come across two articles with particularly good, concise insight on what is going on here. The first is from Paul Horwitz:

The first source of controversy is the collapse of a national consensus on a key element of religious liberty: accommodation. Throughout American history, there has been widespread agreement that in our religiously diverse and widely devout country, it is good for the government to accommodate religious exercise. We have disagreed about particular accommodations (may a Muslim police officer wear a beard, despite police department policy?), and especially about whether religious accommodations should be ordered by judges or crafted by legislators. But we have generally agreed that our nation benefits when we help rather than burden those with religious obligations. That consensus seems, quite suddenly, to have evaporated.

[…]The second article, by Julian Sanchez, gets to what I fear is at the heart of the anger:

[T]he outraged reaction to the ruling ought to seem a bit puzzling. If what you are fundamentally concerned about is whether women have access to no-copay contraception, then there’s no obvious reason to invest such deep significance in the precise accounting details of the mechanism by which it is provided….

The outrage does make sense, of course, if what one fundamentally cares about—or at least, additionally cares about—is the symbolic speech act embedded in the compulsion itself. In other words, if the purpose of the mandate is not merely to achieve a certain practical result, but to declare the qualms of believers with religious objections so utterly underserving of respect that they may be forced to act against their convictions regardless of whether this makes any real difference to the outcome. And something like that does indeed seem to be lurking just beneath—if not at—the surface of many reactions. The ruling seems to provoke anger, not because it will result in women having to pay more for birth control (as it won’t), but at least in part because it fails to send the appropriate cultural signal. Or, at any rate, because it allows religious employers to continue sending the wrong cultural signal—disapproval of certain forms of contraception—when sending that signal does not impede the achievement of the government’s ends in any way.

Personally, I have no sympathy whatever with the substantive moral views of Hobby Lobby’s owners. But I’m dismayed at how many friends who style themselves “liberals,” even recognizing the ruling will make no immediate difference in employee access to contraception, seem to regard it as an appalling betrayal that the Court refused to license what amounts to purely symbolic compulsion of people with retrograde ideas. If we accept that the exemption here makes no functional difference to whether people are covered, however, that’s the only rationale left for insisting on direct purchase of coverage by employers—and not, I had thought, a legitimate rationale for government coercion in a liberal democracy.

That’s troubling.

I think the reason for this is simple – people of faith have allowed the centers of influence in our society to be ceded to the secular left. When a person goes through their entire undergraduate and graduate education being taught by secular leftists, they don’t have a whole lot of tolerance for people who think that nature shows evidence of a Creator/Designer. As far as they know, the universe is eternal, it never came into being out of nothing. The “design” in the universe is an accident – if the constants of physics were altered slightly, we’d just have green skin. The origin of life has been solved by Darwin, and the fossil record shows the gradual emergence of all the phyla over 4 billion years – one every few hundred million years, say. And then someone who thinks all that goes and sits on the Supreme Court and has to make sense of “religious liberty” when it conflicts with their desire to impose their social agenda – recreational sex on demand. I am surprised we even got this narrow 5-4 victory. And I don’t think the next generation of Americans will be this conservative about protecting religious liberty – they think it’s nonsense.