Have you ever been to Hobby Lobby? I haven't, but they have made news in the two years with their staunch refusal to provide health insurance to their employees that provided coverage for birth control while citing their freedom of religious conscience. I did a brief Google search for articles about this debate and came across this gem from what Rush Limbaugh calls the “Huffing and Puffington Post.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/28/hobby-lobby-birth-control-lawsuit_n_4680163.html). Nineteen Democratic Senators (no surprise they are Democrats), including Patty Murray (D-Washington) filed an amicus brief in support of the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act. Hobby Lobby argues that forcing them to provide contraception coverage violates their religious freedom to oppose such things. While reading this article, one blurb immediately caught my eye.

“Allowing a woman’s boss to call the shots about her access to birth control should be inconceivable to all Americans in this day and age, and takes us back to a place in history when women had no voice or choice,” according to the prepared remarks provided to Yahoo that Murray has planned.

If you follow this logic, then if I decided to have sex, I must insist that my employer provide paid access to condoms. However, I have always felt that engaging in intercourse is a choice, and one must therefore bear the cost of such a choice. This paragraph stunningly uses the slippery slope fallacy to suggest denial of contraception will lead down the path to women’s servitude. Yet, one does not lead logically to the other. Am I to believe a woman’s freedom hinges so tightly on this alone that the whole thing can come crashing down so easily?

Where one fallacy exists, another is bound to surface, or at least hide nearby to muddy the waters of intellectual discussion. Actually this blurb reminds me of typical liberal intellectual falsity that presumes the existence of some “right” to something without arguing such a right exists.  This was highlighted in Thomas Sowell's book The Vision of the Anointed.   Sowell says “One of the most remarkable – and popular – ways of seeming to argue without actually producing any arguments is to say that some individual or group has a ‘right’ to something that you want them to have.” Doing this merely focuses on the beneficiary and ignores those whose time and resources have been preempted, he says. We can see that in the above blurb. Some women want their contraception paid for, have decided it is a right, and then preempted the choices that others wish to make with their own freedom and money. The same can be said to a “right” to health care, affordable housing, or any other things declared to be rights today. If these people are not given what they want, they presume, falsely, that all of their freedom will be taken away.

Yet, there can be no constitutional argument for such a right and neither can there be a moral or religious one. On what does such a proclamation rest then? Like many liberal arguments, it rests on nothing. Hobby Lobby may have to acquiesce in the end because of the force of Obamacare’s mandates, but in the end the force of the law is the only thing that can compel such a mandate. Logic certainly can’t.