This is my answer to the deceptively entitled, Could the Supreme Court Re-Legalize Discrimination, at Truthout.
As has become typical of articles published in would-be leftish media, this article tries to be new-atheist click-bait by missing the point. The argument that the Republican-fascists are using to attack the ACA are not based in the Bible, they are based in a libertarian interpretation of the Bill of Rights based on the Supreme Court created superstition of corporate person hood. While people on the left could have been relentlessly attacking corporate person hood, it has been distracted with the election losing strategy of indiscriminately attacking religion and the people who are religious.
The largely class-based atheism of the would-be educated class has led it to push a doubly self-defeating stand for the left. That stand has this in common with the Hobby Lobby side, it uses the Bill of Rights to press the left into committing political suicide on the theory that eventually atheists would be the majority and would achieve their real goal, destroying religion. Only that's not happening and what got destroyed was the left. The left won't win on the basis of atheism, that is the lesson of the meager success that the left has had in American history. Compared to that, the major success of the left of the past century, the Civil Rights movement, was characterized as a religious movement. It foundered when anti-religious figures pushed aside the religious figures.
Attacking corporate person hood is the key to destroying the corporate stranglehold on the United States and through international institutions like the World Trade Organization, on the world. Attacking religion will only prevent destroying the creation of artificial people by the Supreme Court, it is criminally irresponsible for the alleged left to gratify its bigotry instead of attacking the real enemy.
If I had known this was going to go with the loss leader of atheist invective, I wouldn't have bothered reading it. That loss leader only leads to more loss.
In addition to your critique, I'd just add it was a pretty poor argument. It was, in fact, barely an argument at all. The jump from the Hobby Lobby case to the conclusion was really based on nothing more than a need to reach that conclusion by any means necessary.
ReplyDeleteThere wasn't even a connection between that case and the conclusion. It was just words.
I wouldn't have bothered to read the piece if the title hadn't given the impression it was going to be about something substantial instead of leading with neo-atheist click bait. I'm growing ever more skeptical about the usefulness of the "leftist" media because it is saturated with that kind of counterproductive clap trap. It devolves into an impotent and discouraging form of hate talk that enervates the left as well as dividing it. I used to pretend I didn't see that out of leftist solidarity but I've come to see that was mere cowardice on my part. The left could leave the atheists out and probably pick up more than the 2.4% of the population of people who they alienate. And many of that 2.4% aren't leftists as Maddy Murray O'Hair's old American atheists proved when they tried to get a table at CPAC.
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