The American Conservative’s Patrick Deneen has produced probably the best analysis of the Hobby Lobby / Obamacare case which has met its way to the SCOTUS (link below post). Hobby Lobby – and the side of religious liberty – is challenging those who believe the government can require employers to provide contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization services in their employee healthcare plans. Deneen, like myself and most Christians, hopes Hobby Lobby wins its case. At the same time, Deneen sees connections between the economy in which Hobby Lobby operates and a culture which embraces contraception/abortion. His main argument is that Hobby Lobby is a player in the global economy, employing more than $28,000 people to sell cheap shit made in China. Sure, it plays Christian music and is closed on Sundays, but it operates in a secular economic world where markets are separated from morality. The model it embraces is an economy of scale – producing more and more standardized shit oversees (where workers are paid next to nothing). Hobby Lobby’s retail setting also lacks any particular cultural/local distinction. It looks, feels, and operates like any other business which is driven purely by profits. Hobby Lobby embraces an economy which isn’t religious or moral – markets are no longer embedded in a larger moral structure. Deneen notes:
“On the rare occasion that I enter the store, even amid the Chinese mass-produced crosses and the piped in Christian music, under the endless florescent lighting and displays carefully-managed to optimize impulse buying, I am hardly moved to a state of piety, prayer, and thanksgiving. I am, like everyone else, looking for the least chintzy item at the cheapest price.”
More from Deenen:
“It defends its religious views as a matter of individual conscience, of course, because there is no moral, social, or religious context to which it can appeal beyond the autonomy of its own religious belief. Lacking any connecting moral basis on which to stake a social claim, all it can do…is seek an exemption from the general practice of advancing radical autonomy. Yet, the effort to secure an exemption is itself already a concession to the very culture and economy of autonomy.
Most ironically, its entire business model is premised upon the conception of the disembedded self. Its stores are located generally in the middle of nowhere, in a sea of asphalt, providing the simulacra of ancient craft with goods produced by Chinese and transported by massive container ships, accessible only by automobiles generally by people living in suburbs. They have contributed to the displacing of smaller, local businesses with the extensive assistance of government, especially in the form of free-trade agreements, military-protected fossil-fuel production and transportation along with international shipping corridors, state-sponsored infrastructure that give major advantages to businesses that rely heavily on economies of scale based on trucking, and zoning laws that encourage the evisceration of downtowns in favor of national chains. Purchases in these chain stores result in a net outflow of money from these communities into the coffers of distant and absentee owners”
It’s ironic (and ridiculous) a chain store – which profits off turning people into things – is representing the defense of life. For as Deneen says, “Our entire economy is an education on how to be ‘pro-choice’.” Still, let’s hope this aspect of Obamacare is struck down.
Phil's Take 