Hobby Lobby's Obsession -- How did Christianity become reduced to this?

The Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision backs religionists' right to disregard federal laws that rub their consciences the wrong way.  Friends of Hobby Lobby are thrilled with what they claim to be a vindication of "Religious Freedom".  The rest of us tend to see the ruling as a victory for religious oppression, empowering employers to impose their religion on employees to deny them rights and protections of federal laws.

 

It strikes many commentators as a crazy state of American affairs that five Catholic justices didn't blush to lay down a decision that might literally have been dictated by a Vatican counsel.  We've apparently come a hell of a long way from 1960 when a Catholic presidential candidate's viability required a forceful disavowal of any Catholic agenda.  

It occurs to me in the midst of all this to wonder how the Catholic Church resolves the apparent inconsistency between its fetishistic focus on the fetus, not to mention on the embryo and the zygote -- to the point of placing its survival above the health and life of the mother -- at the same time as it requires priests and nuns to be celibate.  Presumably the Church's singular obsession with abortion is not driven by the holy imperative to be fruitful and multiply or the same would apply to the clergy -- unless the Church's material self-interest in keeping priests'/nuns' families from inheriting their property trumped high-minded biblical principles.  The Church's history of entwinement with secular power and wealth makes that a rhetorical question, I think. 

My impression's been that the doctrines of the Church are the product of long and intensive philosophical debate, a la Talmudic investigation -- except for the authoritarian spinal structure that requires questions to be resolved ultimately into legal, not to mention lethal, dogma.  But that impression is not based on much learning on my part, and I really don't know the evolutionary pathway of doctrinal, political and institutional debates, struggles, steps that has yielded what seems to me to be the central preoccupation with abortion and contraception, above and beyond all other values. 

I don't know, but maybe I/we could deal more effectively with this issue if we understood its roots better.  Probably not, since the sense is that most of these believers don't have such a nuanced philosophy about it, other than this is the code of mortal sin that was force-fed from the cradle.  Whatever practical import it may have, I'm just trying to understand what has brought these religious groups to where they are.

Evangelicals are of course at least as exercised about abortion and contraception as Catholics.  The source of their abortion/contraception obsession is a total mystery to me -- outside of George Lakoff's characterization of righties in general as patriarchal, tradition-bound and authoritarian.  Curious that authoritarians are so comfortable with hating the gummint, but of course they only seem to rediscover that deep-seated antipathy and mistrust when a Democrat is in the White House.  'Specially a foreign-born one with an Ay-rab name and dark skin.