Why Is It So Hard to Understand Government Shouldn’t Force Employers to Purchase Birth Control or Permit Guns on Premises?

The (leftie) internet went bonkers yesterday over
the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby  decision,
a narrow ruling that only let “closely held” corporations whose
owners had a religious objection to paying for certain kind of
contraceptives (abortifacients) off the hook from Obamacare’s
“contraceptive mandate.”  Employees, of course, would still be
free to purchase supplemental insurance to cover birth control and
to see their doctor to get a prescription for birth control. They
can’t purchase birth control over the counter but that’s not
because of the Supreme Court or employers with objections—it’s
because the federal government
prohibits the sale of birth control over the counter.

Nevertheless for a certain kind of spouter of partisan talking
points, the Supreme Court ruling—that the government could not, in
fact, bully people into doing something if those people have
religious objections—was more evidence of the “war on women”
Democrats plan to keep running on.

Meanwhile in Georgia, a new gun bill that permits lawfully
licensed residents to carry their firearms into a wide range of
“public accommodations” (like bars) and actual government buildings

goes into effect today. Opponents of the bill, generally
liberals, tend to be the same people who opposed the Hobby
Lobby ruling, while conservatives who applauded the Hobby
Lobby ruling for protecting religious liberty applaud
Georgia’s law for protecting their Second Amendment rights.

Libertarians have to laugh or they’d cry. The partisan break on
Hobby Lobby and Georgia’s gun law doesn’t make sense if
principles mattered. After all, if an employer has a right not to
be coerced by the government to purchase something for an employee,
that same employer ought to have a right not to be coerced by the
government to permit something on his property. Whether the
specific objections are religious shouldn’t even matter—either you
have a right to run your workplace and business as you please or it
belongs to the government.  For too many partisan ideologues,
liberal and conservative, the latter applies. Their political
preferences trump any lip service to principles.