The post-Hobby Lobby debate has been hard to watch. Even though I fully support the ruling, it has served as an opportunity for self-aggrandizement and limited constructive argument. On one side someone screams “religious liberty” and the crowd goes wild trying to drown out the screams of the tie-dye shirted NOW activists and NARAL supporters chanting “war on women.” It’s all propaganda; it’s a lesson in how the use of language is manipulated to political ends. When someone sees a status supporting the ruling and they comment “this is so misogynistic. Susan B. Anthony is turning over in her grave #Ready4Hillary” little is accomplished. The commenter and the original poster may as well be speaking Icelandic and Turkish at each other from opposite sides of Comic-Con.

Jacques Ellul says the following: “Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life.” We needn’t completely agree with Ellul to recognize that propaganda is basically what we call marketing we don’t like. Pro-choice people prefer “fetus” while Pro-lifers think “baby” better captures personhood. When we roll in with our trite arguments and throw out buzzwords we become unintelligible to the other side; we do little more than invite frenzied chanting and drum-beating from our compatriots and the winner is whoever is louder and wore more war paint.

“Religious liberty” and “reproductive rights” are self-validating rallying cries. I belief wholeheartedly in the former, but if I use it around a supporter of the latter I’ve done nothing but shout angrily into the dynamo. Instead, we should be asking about first principles. Questions like: “how is healthcare a right,” “what is a right,” and “how can rights exist in the world if one does not believe in God” are much more effective and can actually convince others instead of simply rallying supporters.

Trite slogans will do little to further anyone’s cause and they certainly don’t further logical debate. There are other ways to argue besides from first principles, but almost anything is more productive than yelling back and forth. If we keep up like this we’ll deepen the divide between Americans and, like the Springfield Tire Fire, burn on indefinitely, fed by ourselves and obscuring everything around us with toxic smog.