Two by Kevin

Kevin Williamson, whose mind and writing chops I readily confess to envying, has two must-reads at NRO today.

One is about how American society came to the juncture at which the Supreme Court is looking at whether Hobby Lobby can refrain from offering coverage of contraception of a certain type as part of the insurance benefits it offers employees.

To a mind like mine, the simple refutation of the assertion that Hobby Lobby can't indeed refrain thus is that no one forces anyone to work at Hobby Lobby, and Hobby Lobby is not obligated to offer anything other than monetary compensation, no natter how much we have all come to assume that insurance is part of an employment package.

But the value of a mind like Williamson's is that he takes that basic truth and examines its full irrefutability, and how the Left attempts to skirt that immutability with well, just a plain skirting of it.  In the process of getting to the actual subject at hand - today's SCOTUS case - he looks at how homosexual marriage went from supposedly being a "straw man" to an assumption, and all it took was for FHers who had reversed course to say, "pay no attention to my previous position."

One of the finest books ever written about politics is The Once and Future King, in which young Arthur, not yet king, is transformed by Merlin into various kinds of animals in order to learn about different kinds of political arrangements: Hawks live under martial law, geese are freewheeling practitioners of spontaneous order, badgers are scholarly isolationists, and ants live under totalitarianism, with T. H. White famously rendering their one-sentence constitution: “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”

There is a great deal of political and moral real estate between those libertarian geese and totalitarian ants — at least there should be, in a healthy, liberal society. But we do not enjoy, at the political and legal levels, a healthy, liberal society. Rather, we are a society that goes from forbidden to compulsory in record time, and vice versa.

Consider the case of the legal and social standing of homosexuals. Until just over a decade ago, homosexual intercourse was a crime in many jurisdictions. Then in 2003, the Supreme Court overturned the sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, which was in my view a bad decision with a good outcome. That same year, California considered a civil-union law, which was the source of some controversy. Opponents argued that it was a step toward the much more serious issue of gay marriage, and Democrats rejected that as a red herring: “Nobody is talking about gay marriage,” said John Longville, a Democratic assemblyman, “except the people who are trying to wave it around as a straw-man issue.” Within five years, that straw man was flesh and blood. Along the way the conversation changed from whether states could legalize gay marriage to whether states couldprohibit it, and from whether the federal government should recognize same-sex marriage to whether it could refuse to do so. 

Having honed its favored-demographic-status-trumps-considerations-of-an-employer's-freedom chops on that issue, it now feels emboldened to apply them to the current issue at hand:

 It is not enough for religious conservatives, such as the ones who own Hobby Lobby, to tolerate the legal sale and use of things such as the so-called morning-after pill — rather, they are expected to provide them at their own expense. Abortions are not to be legal, but legal and funded by the general community, with those funds extracted at gunpoint if necessary.
This is not merely, or even mainly, a question of economics. A monthly dose of emergency contraception (which seems like a lot) paid entirely out-of-pocket would run less than the typical cell-phone bill. One does not suspect that Americans would find it very difficult to locate gay-friendly firms in the wedding-planning business. The typical first-trimester abortion costs less than an entry-level iPad — hardly an insurmountable economic barrier for a procedure that is, if we take the pro-choice side at their word, absolutely fundamental to a woman’s health and happiness.

The economics are incidental. The point is not to ensure that we all pay, but that we are all involved.  

Read the rest of that one.

His other piece at NRO today is about how the Left devises memes that circumvent plain reality:

The great example of our time is the phrase “voting against their own interests,” popularized by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas? Those words, or nearly identical ones, turn up everywhere: the beef-witted columns of Robert Reich, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos, the Bangor Daily News,Alternet, the BBC, The New York Review of Books. Robert Schenkkan even put the phrase into the mouth of Bryan Cranston’s Lyndon Baines Johnson in his new play, All the Way.

As a phrase, “voting against their own interests” clearly has taken on a contagious life of its own, a genuine linguistic meme. But what is its function? Its ostensible function is to communicate the idea that conservative people of modest means, particularly in relatively poor Republican-leaning states, vote for candidates who are in fact hostile to their economic interests, having been beguiled into voting thus by the so-called social issues, by religion, by racism, by Fox News, or by whatever attendant boogeyman will do to swell progressivism, start a tweet or two. But its ostensible function is not its authentic function, nor can it be, because the antithought is engineered to foreclose discussion of the facts that it assumes . . . 

If you find yourself in any tangles with FHers today over the SCOTUS case, listen carefully.  Are they employing this technique?  Don't stand for it.  Keep the discussion focused on what is actually at stake, and refuse to accept their assumptions.