Hobby Lobby Hysteria! Salon Writer Claims ‘This is a Religious Civil War’

Liberals have been spewing absolute nonsense [1] since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, and several other businesses that filed a suit against the HHS contraception mandate. Salon’s Paul Rosenberg is no different, except the fevered, high-pitched whine of his hysteria makes one suspect that, whatever he pays his drycleaner, it ain’t enough. 

In a July 8 piece at Salon [2], Rosenberg actually tried to make the case that “right-wing propaganda about “‘religious liberty’” is a smokescreen to hide the fact that conservatives are pushing for  “the advancement of theocracy,” or as Rosenberg put it “ religious dictatorship.” Yes, because SCOTUS didn’t find an absolute right to free birth control in the Constitution, we’re headed for inquisition, forced conversions and heretic burnings, and all the other theocratic nightmares of the dark days of … 2009. 

Like other liberal media, Rosenberg uses the Hobby Lobby ruling to make the case that religious liberty is somehow involved in and attacking women’s rights. The headline reads, “This is a religious civil war: Hobby Lobby only the beginning for new religious theocrats.” 

If that wasn’t enough to send delicate liberals to the fainting couch, Rosenberg intoned, “The Tea Party controls the House. Religious extremists run the Supreme Court. We're approaching a very scary time.” Wait, what about the Democrat-controlled Senate, the entire Executive Branch and the left-wing mainstream media?

Don’t believe him? But he used references to John Locke, Christian dominionism and Socialist theory all in an attempt to construct a cohesive plot by the Christian right to force their beliefs on others. He called the nefarious scheme “a practice best described as neo-feudalism, taking power away from ordinary citizens, in all their pluralistic, idiosyncratic diversity, and handing it over to corporations and religious dictators in both the public and the private realm.”

Really starting to hyperventilate, he explained that Hobby Lobby means that “women in more than half the nation’s workforce can now be deprived by their employers of their most basic reproductive rights, involving birth control, not abortion.” Those basic reproductive rights that didn’t exist until the Sebelius HHS tacked them on to ObamaCare in a sop to the feminist left? The ones Congress never got to vote on?

Rosenberg dismissed Hobby Lobby’s “deeply held beliefs” as “transparently bogus” and “scientifically invalid,” mocking, “Do they contradict themselves? Of course! So what? Do facts or logic matter anymore? Don’t be ridiculous! Dictatorship means never having to say you’re sorry – much less even a teensy bit wrong.” 

But these kinds of hateful nastygrams to conservatives are Rosenberg’s schtick. He’s tried to make the case that liberals dominate science [3] because conservatives aren’t open-minded enough, and that he’s suggested that conservatives are more prone to psychopathy, which in turn, is making academics wonder “if right-wingers are actually defending, even promoting evil [4].”

And making the rest of us wonder if Rosenberg spends all his time with his skirts over his head.