Doctor Cleveland says this morning: 

"Your religious freedom is yours, alone. It does not belong to your employer, to your landlord, or to anybody else. The deepest stupidity of the inane Hobby Lobby decision is that it uses religious freedom to let your boss take away your religious freedom. That is not acceptable. And it is not sustainable. Five allegedly rational Supreme Court justices have just opened the door to vicious religious conflict. Because letting your boss make your religious decisions is not acceptable, and over the long run people will not accept it."

He then gives us a very literate take on the Constitution and how it severed us, however imperfectly, from more barbarous ages that preceded it.  The court that I thought wanted to take us back the 1950s seems to be reaching much further, perhaps to the 1590s.

Corporations are the new royalty.  First, the court declared corporate person-hood, despite the fact that corporations lack the typical weaknesses of people. Corporations, for example, can be immortal. They cannot be jailed. They cannot even be effectively prosecuted.  The law frequently cannot decide where the crimes of executives end and those of corporations begin.  The directors and officers are covered by insurance. Corporations can pass the costs of fines and penalties onto minority shareholders.

Now, about your bosses making religious decisions for you... They can and they do. The Hobby Lobby now explicitly allows what has been implicit. They also make political decisions for you (they can fire your for your political activities or even for your bumper sticker and bosses can coerce political donations from employees if they use the right words). Employers can test you for drug use outside of work.  Employers can pry into your recreational drinking.  They can use social pressure and your desire to get ahead to get you to do all sorts of things with your precious free time.  Employers are powerful and always have been.

Doc looked at the world before the Constitution.  I recommend also looking at the nascent American economy by having a read of my friend's novel, The New Men, just published a few weeks ago. It's an amazing piece of historical fiction, meticulously researched in Ford's own archives.  Tony Grams is an Italian immigrant, employed in the Ford sociological department.  His job is to vet employees to see who should be brought into a profit sharing program that would pay a $5 a day wage, making Ford by far the best paying employer in town.

Henry Ford saw himself as one of the makers of America and so he took to making Americans.  That $5 a day wage gave him a lot of leverage within the struggling immigrant communities of rising Detroit.  He used that leverage to make people behave to his standards.  Grams examines bank books, condition of furniture and the diets of Ford employees.  His mission is to make sure that Ford's "generosity" is not wasted on drunkards, gamblers, whores or needy relatives.  The wage was so desirable that people were faking marriages to get in on it.

So where Doc sees the Hooby Lobby decision as a break with the present, I see it as something of a continuation of a politics that prefers for society to be shaped by the bosses of business.  Few will be as audacious as Henry Ford.  But, the more successful makers of America might be more subtle.  I hear, for example, that Facebook has subjected us to a giant psychological experiment. Go figure.

Oh, read The New Men. The Dag audience will, in particular, love it.  If you read it not, it will also put you in the mood to read Michael Wolraich's Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics​, out in a few weeks.

UPDATE

Of course, it's worse in China:

"The local offices of the so-called Big Four accounting firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers — took out a paid ad on Friday in local newspapers warning that the Occupy Central protest could disrupt the city’s financial sector. Each of the four declined to comment on Monday.

Another ad appeared on Monday in the newspaper Apple Daily, which is published by Next Media. The ad was signed by “a group of Big 4 staff who love Hong Kong” and said that 'the bosses’ statement' did not represent their views.'"

Funny how American corporations act abroad...