Am I Out of Touch?

EDIT: Ok, so nearly 12 hours later I have to say that when I wrote this it was late at night, I was feeling particularly angry, and therefore would like to say that this whiny drivel is not representative of how I feel about my liberal friends on a daily basis, or really anyone that I interact with regularly.  I decided to not delete it because it was cathartic to write it, and because it gives me perspective.  As I've often maintained, blogs are highly self-indulgent, and this is more for me than it is for whoever may be reading this.  - AD 7/1/14 @10:53am

Today the Supreme Court ruled on the Hobby Lobby case, in which a closely held for-profit corporation sued the government over the stipulation in the Affordable Care Act that employers over a certain size (I think it's 50 employees) must pay for health insurance that includes access to contraceptives.  The suit claimed that such a requirement violated the religious principles of the founders and owners of the company, and therefore was an impingement on their rights to practice their religion free from government interference.  SCOTUS ruled 5-4 in favor of Hobby Lobby, striking down the provision for closely-held for-profits.  Justice Alito, in the majority opinion, cited the Obama Administrations exemptions provided for non-profit organizations on this issue as evidence of the availability of less restrictive means of enforcing the policy as required by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which, on an aside, disturbs me that it even exists, because that means that Congress had to legislate [the last time we had a Democratic president] to reinforce the 1st Amendment).  Also, Justice Alito highlighted that this isn't about corporate rights versus personal rights, since corporations are made up of people, and those people's rights can't be infringed upon simply because they have organized their business enterprise as a corporation.

Needless to say, the liberal half of the country went ballistic.  The usual name-calling, impuning of intelligence, ethics, morality, and agenda, the gleeful highlighting of inconsistency, and all-around mockery of conservatives and people of faith (as though they are a fringe movement worthy of derision and not half of our national population [albeit a half that has far less control over the mechanisms of popular public discourse]) ensued.  Most of my friends on social media, including a number of people whose intellect I highly respect (and yes, that means that I don't respect the intellect of some of them, but I guarantee you they have no more respect for my intellect) were jumping on the bandwagon.  Apparently this ruling somehow restricts women's access to healthcare across the board (even though its just at a few companies, and I would imagine that a significant majority of the female employees of those companies have ideologies in line with the owners of Hobby Lobby and their ilk), as though women working for such companies are not permitted to seek employment someplace else that will pay for their birth control meds.  They are completely ignoring the fact that the suit was only over a discreet number and type of contraceptives that specifically cause concern of terminating a fertilized egg, not preventing fertilization in the first place (which accounts for why Viagra, which is apparently covered by the nonsense that is ACA also, was untouched - it's not a symbol of the patriarchy [though if it was, Pres. Obama, Rep. Pelosi, and Sen. Reid were the ones who put it there] - it just wasn't part of the lawsuit).  Such drugs are held as tantamount to abortion, which about half of this country thinks is an abomination and the other half inexplicably does not (yes, I showed my hand on that issue - I think that abortion is a terrible thing.  No, I'm not inhumane enough to suggest that there are certain exceedingly rare instance in which it may be medically appropriate, but I just don't think that the concept of birth control via killing your unborn child is what a responsible, civilized society should be upholding as a virtue).

Bottom line here is this: am I out of touch?  Does the fact that an overwhelming majority of my contemporaries and peers who choose to speak out on this issue patently and wholeheartedly disagree with my natural reaction signal that I am in the wrong?  Or does it mean that I just need new friends?  Like I said before, I genuinely trust the judgement and respect the viewpoints of some of the people who consistently disagree with my philosophical viewpoint, and I routinely stop to reexamine my own ideology upon seeing it so out of sync with others'.  But honestly, I normally come right back to where I was.  At the risk of sounding like I'm bragging, I'm a pretty smart guy, and I'm at least as well educated as most of the people I run into on facebook, so I don't think this situation is a result of my not intellectually comprehending.

This polarization is really troubling to me, because the most common reaction, encouraged by the talking heads who are trying to sell ad time by getting you to watch them yell about this, that, or the other, is, when something doesn't go your way, to just call the other side evil idiots intent on destroying whatever is good about society and promoting whatever is bad.  I have to believe, call me crazy if you want, that 95% of people on the planet want what's best for everyone.  Does it really help us get anywhere closer to enlightenment by hating on each other so much?

And I'm sorry, if any of my friends read this they'll hate this paragraph, but in my experience the people most contributing to this general toxicity in civil discourse are liberal.  As someone who routinely tests just to the right of center, I run across a lot of people who are either more conservative or more liberal than I am.  Almost without fail, the people who are the least tolerant, the least likely to have a well-rounded base of research in forming their opinions, and who are the most likely to get negative, are liberal.  I'm positive that not all liberal people are like that, just as I know a lot of conservative peopleare absolute   jackasses (I refuse to give money to the RNC because I think that just having an agenda of opposition to the President and the DNC is insufficient, counterproductive, and stupid).  But among my friends (since I have little way of gauging real people otherwise, since I don't believe the news media is an accurate reflection of just about anything at all), the trending traits are cynicism, sarcasm, a massive superiority complex, and raging, angry, *ugly* intolerance for anyone that thinks differently from them.  And sometimes, I don't think they even want to understand those who disagree.  I've run across multiple liberal friends and family members who are ardent, even militant supporters of same-sex marriage rights, who have actually articulated aloud and in writing that they "don't believe in marriage." I'm sorry, then why are you fighting so hard for it?  How does that hypocrisy escape you?  If you don't believe in it for yourself, why in the world would you fight so hard for it for somebody else?  It's kind of like the mindboggling anecdote (I call it that since I lack facts to back it up, but have observed it countless times) of extreme environmentalists and advocates of anthropologic climate change who are chain smokers.  Right, I should stop driving my car, but you should feel free to continue putting smoke and harmful chemicals into the air that serves no purpose whatsoever.  I'll get right on that.

It's gotten quite uncomfortable for me, because I, like everyone else in the digital age, want to share my thoughts and opinions on the events of the day.  However, when I chime in with the dissenting views to the general trend of my peers, the thought police typically drop the hammer on me, hard.  I'm a big boy, and I can take people disagreeing with me, but I'm also smart enough to know when people think I'm an unqualified idiot, barely worth talking to civilly, so off in the woods am I.  It's discouraging, because I'm so much closer to their viewpoint than most conservative people (many of whom I patently disagree with as well, though find myself driven closer and closer to them) they're bound to run into, so if the level of ugly vitriol sent in my direction is any indication, they must hold a shit-ton of hate in their hearts.  I've taken to reposting articles I agree with (which is something that EVERYONE does) on twitter where fewer people follow me and no one comments, since facebook seems to be off-limits for dissent from the groupthink.  I actually had someone unfriend simply because of the periodical I had reposted an article from.  It happened so fast there can't possibly have been a chance that they read it and had formed a cogent, lucid opinion about it.  And as a generally reasonable, mild-mannered, even-keeled (this has been independently verified) human being, I wasn't posting anything so repugnant that an immediate unfriending was warranted.

I genuinely fear for Western society.  We are not on the right track, and we're never going to get there because we can't agree on what the right track should be, and every time we try to have the conversation we're distracted by some shiny new scandal or awful cause that completely derails the conversation (but is forgotten by the next news cycle, which is why I refuse to get too worked up about the cause du jour that's trending on twitter, unless it's still around a month later).  The media encourages us not to agree, because disagreeing and yelling at our opponents sells more "papers" (I recognize that no one buys papers anymore, but it's the same thing as when J. Randolph Hearst manipulated the world to sell more actual papers, just writ digital) than civil and respectful discourse does.  I'm discouraged that many people, even many smart people, fail to recognize that the news media is not to be trusted, because it's ENTERTAINMENT.  I hate to break it to you, but The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are run by comedians.  They are well-spoken and well-researched comedians, yes, but imagine if Jerry Seinfeld had a news show - would you automatically assume that everything he said was gospel?  The internet encourages people to hide behind digital anonymity and be truly hateful to others, and to write things with impunity that I certainly hope they would never have the courage to say to someone's face.

This post may come across as a little whiny, and I'm sure if I ever run for office some day it will get me in trouble, and certainly provides ample opportunity to be take out of context, but I guy needs to vent sometimes, you know?  I'm mad, because I want to be engaging with people on these issues, because they are too important to stay quiet.  But I can't, because there isn't room in the marketplace of ideas for dissent.  Not from narrow-minded conservatives, and not from equally narrow-minded liberals.  In conclusion, after meandering through an unorganized airing of grievances, do I think I'm actually out of touch?  No, I do not.  But I'm concerned for the people who think I am, because I don't think they ever stop to ask themselves the same question.