Supreme Court Oddity: The Use of David Bowie Lyrics in the Recent Hobby Lobby Case

Like many around the world, I was saddened to hear about the passing of David Bowie. Probably may favorite Bowie memory comes from my first year of college at the University of Virginia. In my suite in the Watson dorm, we made a shrine to Bowie and played “Space Oddity” on a loop for 24 hours straight. Why? Probably for the same reason that they got him to judge the “walk-off” in Zoolander: he’s David frickin’ Bowie.

I’m not exactly sure when I first became aware of Bowie. If I had to guess, it was in 1986, when my nine year-old self watched “Labyrinth.” I’ve read the interpretation that “Labyrinth” “was specifically constructed for mind control purposes.” It’s not the only strange interpretation of one of Bowie’s works, as is made clear by one of the amicus briefs in the recent Hobby Lobby/Supreme Court case.

You might have seen some of the news coverage of the Hobby Lobby case. It’s the one in which Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties got five Supreme Court justices to conclude that

As applied to closely held corporations, the regulations promulgated by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring employers to provide their female employees with no-cost access to contraception violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

In support of this position, David Boyle filed an amicus curiae brief. In his brief, Boyle tried to use some pop culture analogies. For instance, he argued that

The recent film Gravity…features an astronaut, Dr. Ryan Stone (played by Sandra Bullock) who, after a disaster, is alive but stranded far above the Earth, and has to make great efforts to escape from the cold of space, back to the warm and welcoming planet below. Due partially to the heroic efforts of another astronaut, Matt Kowalski (played by George Clooney), she successfully manages to wend her way down to the womb of the earth.

Her journey is remarkably similar to that of the newly-fertilized embryo to the womb for implantation, hoping (if one may ascribe emotion) not to die before making it to safety.[FN20] The embryo, zygote, or blastocyte, by whatever name, is lone; miniscule; vulnerable; and human, by the reckoning of many people.

What the Mandate does is to take people, Plaintiffs, who want to help (or not to hurt) the nascent, embryonic child, just as the Clooney character supra is trying to help the Bullock character; and punishes those people if they won’t agree to hurt the embryo by preventing it from making its way to safety. (Or by funding someone to perform that act of prevention.)

Imagine if Gravity had been made with Kowalski trying to prevent Stone from getting back to Earth. That would be quite a shocker. And whereas that film is fiction, in real life, every day, the embryo, in every woman with a fertilized ovum, yearns for a womb in which to be implanted and make its way, nine months hence, to its full humanity out among us in the wide world. All that Plaintiffs are asking for is not to be involved in the cruelty of deliberately preventing that from happening. Amicus hopes that that is not too much to ask of the Court.

In turn, footnote 20 of the brief notes that

The theme of being tragically, perilously “lost in space” is also found in, e.g., David Bowie’s 1969 (Philips/Mercury/RCA) hit rock song Space Oddity – a pun on “Space Odyssey” – about fictional astronaut Major Tom, in danger of death: “This is Ground Control to Major Tom/…./Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong/Can you hear me, Major Tom?/…./ ‘Here am I floating round my tin can/Far above the Moon/Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do’”, id. Outer space makes a fine metaphor, cf. id., for the inner space the embryo inhabits, the embryo that all of us have been at some point inside our mothers: facing a lonely death at any moment, beyond everyday human sight, and maybe beyond help, though not beyond being fatally hurt.

I will leave it to readers to form their own opinions about these analogies. The only thing I’ll note is that I’m surprised Boyle didn’t cite “Major Tom (Coming Home),” Peter Schilling’s quasi-sequel to “Space Oddity”, which features lyrics such as “No need to abort” and 

No one understands but Major Tom sees
Now the light commands, this is my home
I’m coming home

-CM