Think of Brown v. Board of Education or Miranda, two well known instances in which the Supreme Court furthered justice and due process.
But the issue in Hobby Lobby is not that important to Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby probably gambled more on lawyers' fees than they would have paid for the birth control for their employees per year. And the bad publicity is another cost. Certainly more than 60% of American women including women who buy from Hobby Lobby use birth control.
The big question is why the Court took up Hobby Lobby. I don't think it was an accident or the result of overzealous morality on the part of the Catholic, conservative, Republican-appointed five on the Court.
Now I know what I am about to say will sound like a conspiracy theory to some. But I think that this decision is part of a strategy by conservatives like the Koch Brothers who want to change our government and our country to an oligarchic libertarianism. They know most voters wont' go for that so they have devised another method for achieving their goal.
Their first step has been, and Hobby Lobby is a continuation of it, to persuade ultra-conservative Christians (who are for the most part not libertarians) to vote for pro-libertarian candidates.
The Hobby Lobby decision makes these Christian extremists feel good even if the outcome of this ruling will be disastrous for many of their wives and daughters and probably in some cases for themselves.
The apparent goal is to overturn decisions that make birth control available and abortion legal. But that is not the real goal. That is just a means to the end.
The conservatives are trying to convince fundamentalist voters that this nation was intended to be "Christian." Never mind that reading the letters of Jefferson and Adams completely belies that idea, but it is useful to the libertarian minority in the Republican Party because it is what those Revelations-believing Christians want to think. The Court is feeding that small group of Christians this feel-good stuff so that they will vote for conservatives.
Meanwhile the same Court that courts the Christian extremists on sex is satisfying the desires of the corporations giving them just about everything that corporations hunger for.
The Hobby Lobby decision is just another part of a broad strategy that started with the Powell memo.
The paralysis in Congress may be another part of the strategy. The Republican lack of interest in passing any meaningful legislation, any legislation that would lift our economy or help people passes to the Supreme Court the authority to pass laws without congressional checks and balances. And since the small, but most powerful group in the Supreme Court is pretty much owned by conservatives and libertarians, who needs Congress? The more passive Congress is, the more it wastes its time, the more power shifts to the Supreme Court. And to the executive branch, which is why the attacks on Obama, a Democratic president, attacks coming from the far right, are also part of the strategy.
Unfortunately, Obama, at least for the first 6 years, until now, did not comprehend the kind of strategy being used to play against him. I think he does get it now.
And, let's remember. The Supreme Court can issue its edicts. But its edicts must be enforced by Obama, by the executive branch. If Congress is stalemated, if the House majority is Republican and the Senate majority is Democratic, and if the Senate cannot act without the House and cannot pass bills unless it overcomes a filibuster, then it boils down to the Supreme Court v. the executive branch.
This is precisely what libertarians want -- government by an elite that can be bought.
There is a strategy. It's not about petty issues. It is about the big picture.
Meanwhile, we Democrats aimlessly argue about rape, male privilege, white privilege and all our other self-centered (relatively) petty gripes, never devising a strategy for progress.
We see politics as a series of separate issues. We never join together to devise an overall strategy for peace, prosperity and progress.
What with the NSA picking up and tracking all of our communications, it is almost too late for us to talk about broader strategy.
(One of the points of the Occupy encampments was in part to avoid speaking into the ear of the Big Brother libertarians. But most Democrats did not understand that because they did not understand that Big Brother really is watching us. Thank you, Edward Snowden.)
We should be talking about unionizing part-time workers before the Supreme Court completely disables union movements in the absence of a functioning Congress.
What we should be talking about is reviewing all trade agreements and putting tariffs on products that are made by employees paid wages that do not permit them to live in dignity. In the third world, it is better to be a peasant working the soil with a mule than to be a factory working earning starvation wages and sleeping in a bunk in a dormitory.
But then hassling each other about whether men are properly respectful to women or whether, as Leonard Cohen and Sharon Williams so aptly put it "Black Joe is still pickin' cotton for your ribbons and bows" is so much more important than talking about a strategy that will make life livable for all of us, women, blacks, children, teachers, part-time workers, all of us.
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