Hillary Clinton’s Big Lie about Hobby Lobby
Purposely and cleverly duplicitous, shameless demagoguery of the worst sort
Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, and a smart one at that. So she knows better than this statement she made about the Hobby Lobby SCOTUS decision:
It’s very troubling that a salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception, which is pretty expensive, is not going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception.
Politifact rates Clinton’s statement as Mostly False. The WaPo‘s fact-checker gave it 2 Pinocchios.
But although both articles say Clinton is dissembling to a certain extent, they both give Clinton’s statement a more generous interpretation than it deserves, with the WaPo even insinuating that her error might have been inadvertent.
Absurd; as I said, Clinton is a razor-sharp lawyer when she wants to be. She should have gotten the maximum number of Pinocchios and then some.
But I’m not writing this post to rail against Politifact or even the WaPo. I don’t expect them to do anything other than protect Hillary as much as they can get away with, and in fact I’m even surprised they criticized her at all.
I’m writing to point out how pernicious her statement was, how purposely and cleverly duplicitous, shameless demagoguery of the worst sort. And the women (or men) who might fall for it are ignorant and manipulable. But that’s the way it went in 2012, and that’s the way Democrats hope it will go in 2014 and 2016.
Politifact and the WaPo rightly point out that Hobby Lobby offers 16 of 20 kinds of contraception coverage, and they base their criticism of Hillary’s statement mainly on that. What they fail to mention is another purposeful (and IMHO even more pernicious) lie Hillary tells in that same sentence, one that I have yet to see anyone point out. It’s contained in her phrase “her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception.”
This not only incorrectly insinuates that all types of contraception were at issue here (they were not), but it incorporates the larger lie that the case was about employers judging their employees negatively for using certain types of birth control. But that obscures the actual issue in the case, which was that Hobby Lobby did not want to be forced by the government to participate in paying for, and therefore being complicit in, the use of particular types of birth control that violated its own religious beliefs.
Nowhere did Hobby Lobby express any interest in judging whether its employees should be using those or any other forms of contraception. And it was very clear that even IUDs and the morning-after pill, the methods being questioned, would in fact end up being provided cost-free to Hobby Lobby’s employees. Hobby Lobby merely asked to not be required to foot the bill itself for something that violated the religious conscience and beliefs of its owners.
But Hillary Clinton knows that opposing religious freedom—which is what she is actually doing here—is nowhere near as popular a stance as fighting supposed attempts to stop women from having contraception. Although no one is actually attempting that in Hobby Lobby, it makes good copy for the fight against the War on Women on which she believes the success of her candidacy depends.
She will lie shamelessly to manipulate the women for whom she obviously has a great deal of contempt into believing that’s what’s going on.
[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]
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Comments
What chance that we get a Republican nominee capable of discerning this BS and flatly calling it out during a debate?
Zero. Instead, whoever it is will give us a bunch of namby pamby BS trying to out-left “that woman.”
About 100%!
Can you tell me where in the US Constitution there is a right to contraception? It is also not very expensive. Frankly, if you cannot afford the extra ten dollars or so a month, and your partner will not help, I recommend considering abstaining — at least with that partner.
I remember the cry Our Bodies Ourselves and the expression that men should stay out of these affairs. Now they want men (and other women) to pay for their lifestyle choices.
I wonder if Hill-larry quietly and at her own expense offered any help to the child-victim of her rapist client?
Naw. What was I thinking…
Ruthless power-mongering Hillary was certainly not benevolent toward the victims of her rapist husband either.
Let the damned salesclerk find a job somewhere else if she’s unhappy working there.
Coming next to a government near you.
“Can you tell me where in the US Constitution there is a right to contraception?”
Not to play Devil’s advocate, but nowhere is it stated that there is a constitutional right to contraception. That right, such as it is, is established by a regulatory ruling extending from the ACA. It is an indirectly legislated right, which begs the question of whether agencies should be permitted to create law from whole cloth, especially when that law would never have passed had it been in the original legislation, as is the case here.
Regardless, the SCOTUS ruled not that the Constitution didn’t contain a right to contraception, but rather that the ruling requiring that abortificants be provided as part of Hobby Lobby’s insurance coverage for its employees posed an undue burden on the company’s owners’ religious freedom.
I’d like to mention that, had the SCOTUS ruled against Hobby Lobby, it would have set up a conflict between religious conscience and law that would have been unresolvable, resulting in the inevitable destruction of many closely-held companies and church-sponsored institutions.
As it is, I’d like to choke someone over the fact that my tax dollars will be used to buy abortificants for people working for companies that are not closely held or do not have a religious objection to their use.
Next question: what can Congress do about an administrative ruling that subverts its express will not to have federal tax dollars funding abortions?
HIllary is a ruthless lawyer and politician – she knows exactly what lies will float, be believed and perpetuate her political career and help her achieve her agendas.
This is the woman who routinely ground the lives of actual women…victims of her “husband’s” perversions…to powder to keep his political career alive.
She would never let an abstraction like “the truth” get in her way.
I wonder if @HillaryClinton sleepwalks just as lady MacBeth did so long ago.
“Out, damned spot! out, I say!”
#Benghazi
Once upon a time HRC may have been a razor-sharp lawyer, but that time is long past. Kinda like claiming that Dubya is still a top-notch fighter jock, isn’t it? Hillary is a veteran politician without public accomplishment, although like Bill she is expert at lining her own pockets with other folks money. The Clinton Global Initiative is all about converting the Clinton name to cash and all of this “will she or won’t she run” drama serves to keep the cash spigot flowing. She’s very recently shown that she isn’t even up to running a closed-environment book tour, let alone a wide open national campaign for the presidency. She’s just as politically tone deaf as Obama, but without the fawning media cover. She’s just nowhere near as slick as Bill, if you consider being slick an asset.
HRC’s a very comfortable one-percenter who can live out the rest of her years mingling with the global elite, converting the family name to cash. At this point in her rather advanced years being POTUS would be excessive responsibility without adequate reward. No upside whatsoever.
CGI will be the Clinton legacy. As with most things, just follow the money.
Ah, however did anyone point out that, as Hillary was “Co-President” during her husband’s first term, she was also responsible for enacting the RFRA that allowed Hobby Lobby to “escape” from having to pay for the ACA’s mandate!
Ps: Yes, the term co-president has no legal, Constitutional, meaning, yet during his first term Billary proclaimed that “we” got two presidents for the price of one!
Gee, maybe we should come up with some kind of system in which employers could compensate their employees with money, and the employees themselves could then decide what types of contraception, and/or abortion-inducing drugs/devices, they wanted to purchase, if any.
We could call it a “paycheck” or something like that.
WAPO giving a Demcrat two Pinocchios is the equivalent of a Republican four. They know she’s lying but can’t help trying to make excuses,
Is she lying or stupid?
A helluva good case can be made for both.
Also, since the same question can be asked ad infinitum about the Prez-0-Bama, how can Hillary possibly be qualified to be POTUS?
I can think of at least two things that the salesclerk needs regularly that cost more than contraception, but very few employers provide them “free.”
This is not about the cost of contraception. It’s about the sacred status that Democrats bestow on casual sex (with men you don’t know well enough to ask to share the cost) and on abortion.
Dem/libs could give a shit less about $9/month contraception. This is about politics, namely, maintaining a distraction from Obama’s 67 ongoing scandals, and providing another block in the foundation for the apocryphal GOP War On Women™. In order for this particular foundation block to work, they have to obfuscate the actual meaning of the Hobby Lobby ruling. Obfuscation thru rhetoric is a Clinton specialty, itself a foundation block in the Clinton legacy, such as it is.
I wrote much of this comment originally as a comment at Instapundit (on the Megan McArdle piece this am), but am putting it here, modified, since it fits, particularly with Radegunda suggesting that the Democrats’ reaction to Hobby Lobby is about the sacred status that they bestow on casual sex.
It isn’t that.
This isn’t about casual sex or abortion. Hobby Lobby is precisely about religion. The secular left does not view religion as a hobby, it views religion as a competing, non-permissible loyalty. The dissenters are not “model train enthusiasts”, they are disloyal to the State. That explains the anger of the progressive Left to the Hobby Lobby decision and to those of us who do have religious faith.
It is said that the progressive Left would tolerate people of faith if only the latter practiced it strictly from 10 am to 11 am Sunday mornings and otherwise led a life of conformity to the State. That is not quite true — the true secular Left would never allow a citizen an hour to himself/herself. That is the difference between “hobby” and “disloyalty”.
Why did the Obama administration push an administrative rule requiring all employers to provide free contraceptives and not (say) free insulin for diabetics? Because providing free insulin doesn’t require anyone to subordinate their faith to the State, whereas providing forms of contraception that induce an abortion does.
That’s the real issue: it’s about breaking people of faith, by corrupting that faith in ways large and small, by forcing adherents to participate in that corruption and thereby to acknowledge that the State is greater then their God.
This is not about the “War on Women” or religion as a “hobby”. Socialism is a jealous god and will not tolerate any other being placed anywhere near it. That explains the ferocity of the socialists — they KNOW religious faith is a threat to them, and they’re out to break it.
This is an excellent point.
In ancient times the State did the same thing to dissenters from their “religion”. The Books of the Maccabees details the resistance of Jews to the Greeks who demanded that the Jews sacrifice to their gods. The Greeks went as far as erecting a statue of one of their gods in The Temple.
Then in the early Christian era, the Christians refused to sacrifice to idols and thus they were condemned to death.
It is the same story but this time there is no demand to sacrifice to any gods. The only demand is that Christians and others of faith sacrifice their beliefs and bend to the State. There is no difference between these scenarios. It all boils down to persecution of people of faith.
Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, and a smart one at that.
Is she? I don’t recall anything about Hill that would make me think she was smart. I’ve always considered her to be a very pedestrian intellect, somewhere around Obama’s level.
Hillary Clinton was about as razor-sharp as a lawyer as she was a senator and secretary of state. Don’t confuse viciousness and ruthlessness with skill and talent — of which this corrupt old hack has very little of.
Yeah, Hillary. Those $9 a month pills can be “pretty expensive.” But “expensive” is a relative term, considering how broke Hillary is….