"The Stories [Linda Greenhouse] Tell[s]"

So far as I can tell from this NYT piece by Linda Greenhouse, she is (a) upset that the plaintiff in the case challenging the (unconstitutional) Massachusetts law limiting speech around abortion clinics is genial and appealing and (b) upset that some of the plaintiffs challenging the HHS contraceptive-coverage mandate have the genial and appealing name "Little Sisters of the Poor."  These facts are resulting, she fears, in the wrong "story" being told about these cases.  The right story, in her view, is that "the church" and others are engaged in a "deadly serious and sophisticated campaign, a claim by religion for primacy in the public square. . . .  The church plays a long game."  The right story is that a case brought by a nice little old lady in Massachusetts is a "vehicle in a nationally designed effort to get the Roberts court to reopen settled questions concerning abortion." 

The former is, I'm afraid, Blanshardian nonsense and the latter wrongly suggests that there's something "settled" about Hill v. Colorado case, which most free-speech scholars (left, right, and center) regard as an outlier and incorrect.  

She concludes with this:

Next month, the justices will hear the Hobby Lobby case, the challenge to the contraception mandate by a for-profit corporation that engages in commerce and employs thousands of people. Hobby Lobby has received a good deal of attention, the Little Sisters less so. The next few months will tell us whether the Supreme Court, captivated by the nuns’ narrative, merely stumbled into the role of enabling a school-yard bully, or whether its puzzling behavior signifies a new chapter in a perennial story, the struggle over the role of religion in the country’s public life.

I'm not sure who is the "school-yard bully" -- Hobby Lobby?  Surely not the Little Sisters?  As I see it, the only pushing around that is involved in this case is coming from the Administration, and the only "bully" around to be "enabled" by the Court, is the HHS.  I guess I am reading a different "story."

UPDATE:  From a reader:

“'Sin.' Now there’s a scary word -- or it might be if it bore any relation to reality. But as the government explained, it doesn’t."

  - Linda Greenhouse, "The Stories We Tell," New York Times, 2/5/14

 "The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin;—that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility and fact; is dead: it is 'pure' as dead dry sand is pure."

  - Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1841)

UPDATE:  This from a friend and reader, Prof. Kurt Lash (Illinois):

Linda Greenhouse’s latest effort deserves more notice—and condemnation. Greenhouse begins her editorial “The Stories We Tell” with the perfectly appropriate warning not to let the attractiveness of the party before the court influence the analysis and application of the law.  This is why lady Justice is portrayed as blindfolded—so as not to be swayed by personalities before the court.

But then Greenhouse calls upon her readers (who she hopes includes the Justices) to judge the case according to the real party Greenhouse sees standing in the shadows—The Church.  Don’t think about the parties before the Court, she warns.  Their claims “are not popping up randomly or by accident.”  No, these cases are part of “a nationally designed effort,” by a “school yard bully,” who, with “sustained aggressiveness” “sense[s] weakness in the executive branch and welcoming arms at the Roberts court.”

And why would there be welcoming arms at the Supreme Court?  Greenhouse feigns being “baffled” at the Court’s injunction protecting the Little Sisters while their case is on appeal.  After all, there is no reasonable legal explanation for this “puzzling behavior.”  What, oh what, Greenhouse poisonously wonders, might possibly explain why a majority of the Robert’s Court would protect these Roman Catholic nuns? She’s “stumped.” Her mind’s a blank.

Except her mind is not blank at all.  Her noxious essay is an attempt to paint these cases as driven by the “aggressive" Roman Catholic Church, and warn the Roman Catholic members of the Supreme Court that any ruling in favor of religious liberty will be rightly viewed as imposing their beliefs on the rest of the country.  After all, there is no other reasonable explanation.

Greenhouse is right to see the arguments in these cases as part of “perennial story.”  But the foul smelling perennial in this case is religious bigotry.  “The Church plays a long game,” Greenhouse tells us.  Which Church is that, Linda?  One could ridicule her paranoid fantasy that Rome has somehow arranged to have these cases arrive at the Supreme Court at just the right time when Rome has also managed to place on the Supreme Court a sufficient number of Pope-controlled justice-bots. 

But there is nothing here to laugh at.  Greenhouse has abandoned one of the critical pillars of justice and called upon the Court and the public to judge the application of law according to Greenhouse’s vision of the real party before the Court: The Roman Catholic Church.  It’s a shameful if transparent effort to pressure the Catholic members of the Court and inflame anti-Catholic sentiment in the country. It’s an old story.  A “long game” indeed.