In the Hobby Lobby case:
Justice Elena Kagan also vigorously defended the coverage rule, arguing that Hobby Lobby and Conestoga were not being forced to provide insurance coverage and could simply choose not to by paying $2,000 per year per employee—an amount far lower than the cost of health insurance.
We’re not going to force you to do anything. You’re perfectly free to choose to be punished rather than to obey.
newspeak 
It strikes me as a kind of parody of our relationship to God: you disobey God, things don’t go well for you. Not an accidental resemblance, although not a conscious one, either.
Well, law and social practice are now so structured that lawyers end up adjudicating just about everything. Now we discover that a great many of them are not to be trusted to take care of a Chia pet. (The Democratic Party is quite at home with this situation. It’s run by lawyers).
The root of the problem seems to me to be a conception of law as more or less arbitrary rules, rooted loosely if at all in principles. There are some people who thrive in an environment of labyrinthine rules, and it appears that lawyers are disproportionately of that type. I don’t know if it was always so, or always this bad. The combination of that sort of personality with that conception of law is bad news for everybody else.
Modern secular people simply have this idea that the law and even what is right are whatever the majority of people decide. No Catholic can reasonably hold that view where serious matters of principle are at stake. This is why there must be outright hostility, in the end, between Catholics and the State.
It strikes me as a kind of parody of our relationship to God: you disobey God, things don’t go well for you. Not an accidental resemblance, although not a conscious one, either.
Yes, because in the end Caesar demands to be worshiped.
Modern secular people simply have this idea that the law and even what is right are whatever the majority of people decide.
No. If there’s one thing the professional-managerial bourgeoisie does not respect in this country it is any mechanism (e.g. majority rule) which would allow the vernacular society to have its way.
Well, yes and no. This is one of the areas where they practice a sort of doublethink. The people should rule–but an awful lot of them need to be fixed first. An inarticulate and unnoticed survival of the idea that the people must be freed from “false consciousness.”
There is a scene in Amazing Grace where Wilburforce says, “You cannot silence the voice of the people,” and the other MP smirks and says, “The people!”
This is the House of COMMONS.
On a side note, it would be very entertaining if the House of Representatives were run like the House of Commons.
The people should rule–but an awful lot of them need to be fixed first.
Bingo.
The people should rule–but an awful lot of them need to be fixed first.
Yes, that’s a good point.
Light On Dark Water 
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