Burke v. Hobbes; an open, pluralistic public square, hospitable to all convictions, or a bare public square in which only arguments based on secularist premises are tolerated; a rich diversity of mediating, civil society institutions that perform the works of charity and are schools of liberty, or a dull, grey uniformity of public life, enforced by a hegemonic state committed to the idea that freedom is a matter of will rather than intellect — those are the issues. The issue is not birth control and Sandra Fluke is not a 21st-century Joan of Arc. The issue is religious freedom. The issue is the future of American civil society.

The assault on America's first liberty, religious freedom, has sounded the alarm over a concerted assault on the entire structure of liberty in a pluralistic democracy, by an administration that imagines itself heir to Saul Alinsky, the radical community organiser, but is in fact the spawn of Thomas Hobbes.