Supreme Court Sucker Punch

As parents we make the rules in our house: in bed by nine, no dessert until you’ve eaten your dinner, no hitting your brother with the wiffle ball bat – you know, the basics. Because let’s face it, even on the best of days raising a family is managed chaos and craziness. Can you imagine what would happen if you started arbitrarily applying the rules? I shudder to think of the mutiny that would ensue if I let one of my sons play Minecraft on his iPad at the dinner table while the other had to follow the no electronics at the dinner table rule? A rule is a rule. Any seven-year old kid knows that.

So it is from a sense of fairness – of the just application of the law of the land – that I am furious at the Supreme Court for violating such a basic principle of governance. Because whether or not you are on board with the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, doesn’t matter. Just like it doesn’t matter if my kids are onboard with me restricting electronics at the dinner table. I would even argue that the passionate deeply held belief that my boys have about Minecraft rivals the deeply held religious beliefs of any religious group – I’m certain parents with Minecraft addicted children would agree.

And this business of a corporation being able to skirt the law of the land if they are closely held (meaning 50% or more of the company is owned by 5 or fewer individuals) is flat-out wrong. Lets go back to my dinner table. What happens if I start to hand out passes to play Minecraft at the dinner table to one of my sons and not the other? Maybe I let the older one play because he is more mature or the younger one because he is the baby and can’t help himself or one is better academically or the other is better at sports. Resentment, hurt, and years of therapy would ensue from such disparate application of family rules. At the end of the day they are both my children and they both must follow the same rules. Again, every seven-year old knows this to be true.

Children also have a fine tuned sense of what is just and right, which the Supreme Court has seemed to have lost touch with. Every child wants to see Cinderella land the Prince after being tortured for years by her evil step-sisters and step-mother. Kids innately know that Captain Hook should spend the rest of his days running from the crocodile after trying to destroy Peter Pan and the lost boys. When people face tough times, they get to come out on top if they persevere. That’s the basic moral of every childhood tale. So when a young woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, endures a double mastectomy, and rounds of chemotherapy and finally her doctor gives her a clean bill of health she gets to live happily ever after. Right? Well in this version of the story if she works at Hobby Lobby and wants to use birth control recommended to her by her doctor without the hormones that could trigger a recurrence she has to now pay for it out-of-pocket. Those copper IUDs run about $750 – roughly the monthly take home pay of a minimum wage worker at Hobby Lobby. Doesn’t really seem fair, does it?

And finally all kids know that rules are to be followed no matter what the circumstance. So I’m sure they would be as baffled as I am that Hobby Lobby’s 401(k) allowed employees to invest in the very companies that produce the types of birth control they purport to be morally opposed to. So Hobby Lobby is okay with it under one set of circumstances but not in another? If your children possess an advanced vocabulary they’d call this hypocrisy – if not they’d call it liar, liar pants on fire.

On every basic level the Supreme Court’s decision was wrong. It is an unjust outcome in favor of an hypocritical organization. I say this as a strong Christian who has a very deep personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And I say this as a mother who would like to be able to tell my children that the rules are fairly applied, the little guy has the same protection as the rich and the powerful, and justice is blind.

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