Sunday, July 6, 2014

High Priestess Ginsburg Rebukes the Heathen


What happens when sloganeering replaces thought.


Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg professes to be offended by the idea that a commercial enterprise can claim protection under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. She is just as adamant in her insistence that an equally abstract entity called the “government” has “interests” that justify imposing on the property rights of private business owners.

“The exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities,” Ginsburg complained in her dissent in the Court’s recent Hobby Lobby ruling.  In defense of that proposition she cites John Marshall’s description of a corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” In similar fashion, she quotes John Paul Stevens’ observation that corporations “have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.”

Ginsburg appears to be a chromosome-level statist, which is why she doesn’t understand that this descriptive language also applies to the fictive entity called “government.” It, too, is an invisible, impersonal abstraction existing only in the minds of those who believe in it. The “government” has no body, parts, or passions. It has no hands save those that are raised by believers in violence against the infidels, and (to paraphrase Nietzsche) no wealth save that which was stolen in its name.

The substantive difference between a business enterprise and a “government” is that the former is an association of people who engage in commerce, rather than coercion. Absent the cooperation of those calling themselves the government, a corporation cannot compel anybody to purchase their services. The majority in the Hobby Lobby ruling tentatively suggested that there are limits on the government’s supposed authority to compel people to purchase services on behalf of others – a development Ginsburg treats as a portent of impending anarchy. We should only be so lucky.


Throughout her puerile and petulant dissent, Ginsburg piously invokes what she calls the “compelling interest” of the government in forcing private business owners to underwrite the purchase of contraceptives by their female employees. 

She doesn’t explain how an impalpable construct with no tangible form or individual will can be “compelled” by anything. What she, and people of her persuasion, mean when they employ that phrase is that those who act in the name of the “government” can claim an interest in compelling others to behave in certain ways.

According to Ginsburg, the question that defines this controversy is not “By what authority does the government compel?” but rather “By what right does anyone claim an exemption?”

 The majority decision held that under the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the federal government is required to accommodate the religious convictions of business owners who do not want to be compelled to underwrite specific forms of birth control – in this case, four of sixteen FDA-approved methods that can reasonably be construed as abortifacients.

Giving voice to the totalitarian left – those who believe that government powers, exercised by the “right” people, should be illimitable – Ginsburg protests that this exemption opens the “floodgates” to supposed social horrors of every kind.

“Hobby Lobby and Conestoga [a company that joined in the lawsuit] surely do not stand alone as commercial enterprises seeking exemptions from generally applicable laws on the basis of their religious beliefs,” she writes, reeling off a series of previous rulings against business owners who were found in violation of anti-discrimination statutes. The list included a restaurant owner from Georgia who refused to accept black customers in the 1960s, and the more recent case of New Mexico wedding photographer Elane Huguenin, who was punished for refusing to provide her services to a same-sex couple.

According to Ginsburg and the professional collectivist hysterics who pretend to believe her, the federal government's claimed power to compel Christian employers to underwrite the purchase of abortion pills for their female employees is the only thing preventing the imposition of a totalitarian theocracy, or large-scale reversion to Jim Crow.

“Would the exemption the Court holds RFRA demands for employers with religiously grounded objections to the use of certain contraceptives extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions … antidepressants … medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin .. and vaccinations?” Ginsburg continues. By granting any religious exceptions to what she insists is a “neutral, generally applicable law,” the majority “has ventured into a minefield” in which they will have to assess the merits of each claimed religious exemption.
 
Collectivist tolerance on display.
This makes sense only if we ignore the only “neutral, generally applicable law” that exists – the law of non-aggression against property rights. Ginsburg is a collectivist by inclination, so it’s not surprising that her dissent ignores the question of property rights entirely: In what sense did Hobby Lobby’s corporate policy violate the property rights of their female employees?

“No doubt the Greens and Hahns” – the family owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga, respectively – “and all who share their beliefs may decline to acquire for themselves the contraceptives in question,” Ginsburg sneers, condescension coloring every syllable. “But that choice may not be imposed on employees who hold other beliefs.” She does not deign to explain how declining to subsidize another person’s choices amounts to an “imposition” – or why those acting in the name of the formless, disincarnate “government” can impose upon employers to provide such subsidies.

 “Working for Hobby Lobby or Conestoga … should not deprive employees of the preventive care available to workers at the shop next door,” Ginsburg decrees. She neither addresses nor seems to contemplate this question: If such care is all-important, why would women seeking it choose to work at Hobby Lobby, rather than “the shop next door”? One answer is that Hobby Lobby is a growing company whose owners offer very generous compensation – more than double the minimum wage – in an economy that has been made sick unto death through the ministrations of the “government” before which Ginsburg and her ilk would force us to genuflect.

When Hobby Lobby’s female employees are paid, their wages become their property and can be spent on any birth control method they desire, without restrictions or impositions of any kind from the company’s owners. Those working at the “shop next door,” on the other hand, might very well receive full coverage -- until the business that employs them suffocates beneath the unbearable weight of the government’s regulatory mandates. But sacrifices of that kind are necessary to propitiate the omniprovident entity called “Government,” as Ginsburg and other priests and priestess of its cult will patiently explain to individualist heathen.








Dum spiro, pugno!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

All of which makes me wonder how Ruth would feel about the 13th Amendment. If government takes more than half of an employee's "wages" leaving that real person with less than half of their wages. Do they become property of the state at that point, so that Constitutional right doesn't apply because the government's rights matter more, for the common good.
How do such lawyers legally remain on the bench is beyond reason.

Anonymous said...

"You sexist pigs stay out of my bedroom while paying for my birth control!"

Bob O'Reilly said...

Mr. Grigg,

Thank you for writing these articles, and for your tenacity and devotion to relaying reality and the truth. Your pieces always enlighten and educate me, no matter how painful it can be to acknowledge the material you present.

However, it's simply too enraging and depressing to read much of this stuff anymore. I'm avoiding dozens of informative sites such as yours because I'm becoming a very foul and potentially evil person. The hope of a bright near future is long gone.

I see the same temperament manifesting in almost every other situationally aware person I know, and if it wasn't for the grace of the Lord Himself giving us forbearance, I firmly believe that a massive reckoning would've already begun.

All of these packets of information, from this site and those others, are slowly adding up to an incredible amount of mass, weighing heavily on everyone, and skewing the balance of what we can tolerate.

We're not "voting" our way out of this, and every other peaceful avenue for redress has been exhausted.

I think many of us are simply awaiting the tipping point, when a plurality of Americans will have finally run out of patience and arrived at that same conclusion.

Either that, or this house of cards we laughingly refer to as our "economy" will come tumbling down. That's also unavoidable.

Then we will see the most bloody and horrifying conflict in the history of the planet. I'm not looking forward to it, but I can't see any other path through this coming sociopoliticoeconomic collapse. The pent up frustration, cold fury, and silent rage will be released like fission bombs. Uncontrollable.

It doesn't have to start here, but the effects will be global, affecting everyone as the dominos fall.

I still hope that the survivors can recover and rebuild after the dust settles, but civilization might just go completely over the edge. "Mad Max" or "The Postman" scenarios aren't that difficult to envision.

The only fact is that NOBODY can predict what is going to happen, and the only certainty is that we are simply headed for a literal world of hurt. Continuing to submit to slavery doesn't seem to be an option. And the statists/collectivists aren't going to go down quietly.

Perhaps the lines from Jimi Hendrix' "Voodoo Child" would be a good one to sign off with?
"If I don't see you no more in this world, I'll meet ya in the next one, and don't be late."

May God bless and keep you all.

Anonymous said...

Bob O'Reilly, there is a way out and you can help, more than you may understand. The problem is as old as mankind itself. Men have allow other men to run their business. Mankind is made up of and are sinners, why on earth do we allow sinners to run government that has control to a point of life and death over us. The answer is, because mankind is a sinner, we need to limit government to very limited control over people's lives. Limited government is the answer and the only answer. Limited government is the only way we can protect ourself because the media isn't the watchdog it was intended to be. The media is a big part of the sinners and the sins they commit.
Lets take a look at history to prove that its a huge mistake and very deadly mistake to but sinners which is all men with the kind of control government has. And yes, voting only allows people to pick one sinner from another. History, the 20th century is a textbook example of how mankind is nothing more than a bunch of sinners. Once governments disarmed their own citizens, those very same governments murdered their own and newly disarmed citizens to a tune of no less than 185 million men, woman and children. During the 20th century 90 percent of the deaths during war were the civilians, non military and non combat man, woman and children. But families who really had no dog in the fight.
The answer is and the Founders got it, is to have a very limited government. Once you cross the line, the sinners will be doing what sinners do and it will only get worse and time goes on because the more the sinners get aways with the more they will sin.
Why on earth do people give sinners so much power is beyond stupid. Why do the churches not expose this radical idea of giving mankind/sinners such power to murder, destroy the minds of the young with propaganda and unhealthy teachings, taxing away people's wages and the rest of the corruption that we allow ourselves to be governed under.
Bob O'Reilly, you and others like you must demand the leaders of your church to explain why they support through their silence, giving sinners so much power to abuse Christian families. If you don't get an answer, simply ask the question again and again if needed. Ask your friends and your family members. Ask everyone you know of faith, "why do we give sinners so much power and allow them to abuse all of us with that power?" Doing so may make a difference and maybe we can get a movement for very limited government and accountable government. If we don't, we may live to see the 20th century repeat itself.

Anonymous said...

I guess businesses “have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires", as Justice Stevens says, but he forgets that they are owned and run by human beings who I guess give up all those traits when they start a business.

This is just another step in dehumanizing us.

Anonymous said...

So, ladies, tell me again how your reproductive systems are 0% my business but 100% my financial reponsibility?

Anonymous said...

If the left is going to continue to equate a "Right" with it being "Easily Accessible" and of course "Free" I wonder when they will loosen those restrictions on guns. After all, unlike abortion and birth control and health care, there is an actual amendment enshrining a right to a gun.

On a slightly tangential note I have been informing others that forcing a man pay for the Birth Control/ Abortion of someone he has not been sleeping with is the equivalent of having him get yelled at by a woman for several hours before some other dude gets the awesome make-up sex...

rkshanny said...

To Anon 6:16:
Keep reading and learning. You got a ways to go.
"limited government"?! He, he!
"founders got it"?! He, he!
"accountable government"?! He, he!
"movement"?! I'm getting a movement alright, but it ain't the kind I should talk about publicly! He, he!
Put lewrockwell.com on your reading list. . .today!

Anonymous said...

There is only one WNG. If we had a MILLION men like him we could save this country. I read him when he wrote for American Opinion he was my favorite. Then he went solo and the fire-breathing patriot came out.

Ruthe Bader Ginsburg is one of three Jews on the Supreme Court, that is 33.333 Percent of the Court. Supposedly there are only 6,000,000 (there's that number again) of them in the US.

Now there may be a single Protestant on the Court (Clarence Thomas?) but surely the Deicide Deniers are OVER REPRESENTED and without exception Bryer, Kagan and Ginsburg are all VEHEMENTLY and OMINIOUSLY Anti-Christian and it was CHRISTIANS who established America.
We've come a long way from the day that America was unarguably a CHRISTIAN NATION. These people have kicked Our Lord to the curb.

And what do Protestants do? Why they follow Hagee and Pat Robertson and Joe Farah all these worshippers, not of the King of Kings, but of His enemies.

Raping our freedoms and trashing Christ this is the THANK YOU we get for all we've done for them and their true home.

I can't help but think of Benjamin Martin, Mel Gibson's character in The Patriot. Where are the men who will stand up and fight this Beast? Surely WNG can't do it on his own, though sometimes it does seem possible.

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? John 11:24-26