David McElroy

After a divided Supreme Court ruled today that Hobby Lobby can’t be forced to buy birth control for its employees, the reactions have been predictable.

Social conservatives are hailing it as a great blow for freedom. Progressive leftists are screaming that this is about bosses controlling access to birth control for their employees. At any moment, I expect to see the chant start somewhere that the five justices on the winning side hate women.

I have trouble working up any enthusiasm about this case. Yes, it’s a good decision in a narrow way for religious freedom, but it’s pretty hollow when seen in context of everything else.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that Americans can be forced to buy things they don’t want to buy for themselves. Think about that. If the government believes you should buy hamburgers from McDonald’s or a subscription to National Geographic or a specified array of sex toys, the court has said it’s fine for government to require that of you and punish you if you don’t comply.

The court has already said that it’s perfectly fine to force employers to buy health care for their employees — plans that the government must approve. Whatever government deems to be necessary, companies can be forced to buy for you, whether you want it or not.

The Hobby Lobby decision only says that if a company’s owners object to birth control on moral grounds, they can’t be forced to purchase that particular coverage.

That’s all this decision does. While it’s right in the very narrow sense, it’s so utterly inconsequential compared to everything else that’s already been mandated that it’s hard to believe it matters.

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When I stepped outside my front door Sunday afternoon, I saw four young children running around playing together. On the porch next door, there was a father keeping an eye on the kids. He smiled and waved as he said he hoped they weren’t being too loud.

There was absolutely nothing unusual about this scene, but it wouldn’t have taken place this way even 20 years ago. And it would have been illegal and maybe caused riots 50 years ago.

Why?

One of the children was a little blonde girl. One was a black boy. Another girl was a black/white mix. The fourth was an Asian boy. The father was Asian, too.

The nice thing is that it was perfectly normal in a middle class southern suburb today. The tragedy is that it would have ever been a big deal and that it remains a big deal to some people even now.

When I moved to Trussville 20 years ago, it was still a sleepy little town that hadn’t quite come to grips with being a bedroom suburb of Birmingham. Not too many years before that, it had been a tiny Mayberry out in the country. And some of the thinking of some of the people still reflected a dying past.

I remember a young guy who had grown up in the town talking to me about racial changes in the area. He lived on my street and I was speculating about when we would see black neighbors there.

“Oh, they’ll never let that happen,” he said confidently, without specifying who “they” might be. “All the niggers live up on ‘Nigger Hill.’ They won’t ever let ’em move down here.”

This was around 1992, so I was shocked to hear someone still hold those sorts of views, much less openly stating them. I didn’t try to argue with him or explain the offensiveness of what he was saying. I just marked him in my mind as an ignorant redneck.

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I’m right about everything — at least in my own mind.

If you agree with me about certain things, I’ll give you credit for intelligence, good judgment and more. If you disagree with me about other things, I’ll silently judge you and maybe even feel disdain for your lack of taste and manners. But about a whole range of other things, I’ve magnanimously decided that I won’t judge you whatever you believe. I’ve either decided it’s of no consequence if we disagree or maybe I just don’t care enough about the subject to praise you or judge you about it.

You’re doing the same thing to me, whether you’re conscious of it or not. We’re all doing it to each other. We just have different things we care about and different things we judge each other about.

We do it about big things and we do it about little things.

In politics and philosophy, we can’t believe that an intelligent, honest and decent person could see things so differently than we do, so it becomes clear to us that other people are either stupid or lying. Maybe they even have bad intentions. Maybe they’re evil, because a good person couldn’t come to their conclusions.

Listen to the way people talk to each other. They get frustrated when people want things they don’t think are worth having. If a person says he wants to live in the Pacific Northwest, someone who hates rain and prefers sun will pipe up to say, “You’ll hate it there. It rains all the time,” with no apparent understanding that some people prefer rain to sunshine.

People recommend things by saying, “You’ll like this movie.” (Or it could be a book or a play or a restaurant.) Why would someone say that? Because he likes it, of course. On some level, most of us have an instinct to feel some version of this idea: “If I didn’t like it, don’t even try it. Your taste couldn’t possible be different and I couldn’t possibly be wrong.” (And, yes, some of us work hard to overcome that instinct because we’ve learned how different others are, but we’re in the minority and it’s still hard for us — in ways that we often overlook.)

Although we might understand in theory that products are a result of a thousand tradeoffs, we think products that don’t make the same choices we prefer are terrible products. The product I prefer is obviously superior. The product you prefer “sucks” — even if it meets your needs better than my choice would.

We don’t consciously believe that everyone should be like us, but when we’re in that moment, we believe on some gut level that our subjective experience must be everyone’s objective experience — and that our subjective preference should be everyone’s objective preference.

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