Posted on 07/13/2014 7:46:17 PM PDT by Coleus
Roughly 50 people lined up in front of Hobby Lobby’s new Totowa store Saturday to protest the company’s role in a recent Supreme Court decision that says the company can choose not to cover contraception for its employees through the Affordable Care Act.
The Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain is owned by a Christian family that says it tries to run the business applying its religious beliefs. One of the parties in the decision by the high court, the family had argued that the Obamacare requirement that all contraception be covered violated a 1993 federal law that protects religious freedom. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., agreed. Alito wrote that the court ruling only held for “closely held” for-profit corporations such as Hobby Lobby.
The Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision has been attacked by many women’s rights groups, and Democrats in the U.S. Senate are moving to introduce legislation that would sidestep the ruling. A companion bill would have a much harder time passing in the Republican-controlled House.
For two hours Saturday afternoon, the protesters in front of the Totowa Hobby Lobby — newly opened as of July 7 — held hand-lettered signs with such slogans as “Family planning is a family value,” “Women’s values trump corporate dictates,” and “My religious freedom has been given to corporations.”
They also chanted “Hobby Lobby, hear the news — religious views are for the pews.”
“I’m here to support women’s choice,” said Jean Star of Wyckoff. “I think the court made a very, very bad decision. A corporation is not a person.”
The protest was organized by the Rev. Kathleen Green, a minister with the Unitarian Society of Ridgewood. Green is on the board of the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of New Jersey, the church’s lobbying arm. She was joined by members of the National Organization for Women’s New Jersey chapter, the League of Women Voters of New Jersey and Planned Parenthood.
Green said the argument against the court ruling could be summed up as “My body, my faith, my choice.”
“Religious liberty is for people,” Green said. “Hobby Lobby doesn’t go to church on Sunday. Corporations can’t speak for all women. This decision puts all American women’s lives at risk based on one corporation’s owners.”
The company has said it did not oppose all contraception, just morning-after pills and intrauterine devices, or IUDs, since they believed these were similar to abortion.
“Medical studies will tell you the IUD is the most effective form of contraception used by women and especially low-income women,” Green said.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in a dissenting opinion in the case, wrote that the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month’s full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage.
A Hobby Lobby store manager said she could not comment on the protest, and the company’s spokesman could not be reached.
Posted on Hobby Lobby’s corporate website is a quote from Barbara Green, a company co-founder, saying the family was “overjoyed” by the Supreme Court ruling.
“The nation’s highest court has re-affirmed the vital importance of religious liberty as one of our country’s founding principles,” she said. “The Court’s decision is a victory … for all who seek to live out their faith.”
Jane Gordon, a protester from Manhattan, said she believed the Hobby Lobby owners had a genuine religious objection to covering contraception, but the court decision was wrong.
“People are entitled to practice their faith,” she said, “but not to impose their faith on other people.”
Protesters handed out leaflets to those entering and leaving the store, listing “7 reasons NOT to shop at Hobby Lobby.”
The leaflet argued that the company’s grievance is not with birth control, but is a political attack on the Affordable Care Act, since before the act was passed, the company’s insurance coverage included the forms of contraception they took exception to through the legal case.
The leaflet also said Hobby Lobby’s 401(k) plan has invested in companies that produce the same types of contraception that Hobby Lobby didn’t want to pay for through insurance. The leaflet cited the company’s 2012 employee benefit plan’s annual return filing.
The leaflet also listed the addresses of several other hobby stores in the area for those who want to boycott Hobby Lobby.
From wiki:
Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), in full the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations in North America, is a liberal religious association of Unitarian Universalist congregations formed by the consolidation in 1961 of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America.[2] Both of these predecessor organizations began as Christian Unitarian and Christian Universalist denominations. However, modern Unitarian Universalists see themselves as a separate religion with its own beliefs and affinities. They define themselves as non-creedal, and draw wisdom from various religions and philosophies, including Humanism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Earth-centered spirituality.[3][4] Thus, the UUA is a syncretistic religious group with liberal leanings.
Similar idiots were protesting today in Bangor, Maine on the street in front of the Hobby Lobby store.
About 20 lefties. I saw it on the news tonight. Mostly fat, fugly women along with moonbat “men.”
When TEA Party people or gun rights people protest something, they are rarely shown on the news.
Hobby Lobby is not preventing anyone from using whatever form of birth control they want to use. Just that they object to paying for certain forms of birth control.
Unlike most business, Hobby Lobby is closed on Sundays, so they certainly don’t put the almighty dollar ahead of their beliefs. You don’t give up all your rights just because you form a corporation.
I suggested my wife go into Hobby Lobby while I went to the Post Office. It was a new store and we had never been in one. She ended up being in there for over an hour. I thought the store was very impressive in terms of layout and display, but full of phony but authentic looking “antique” and “distressed” “country” items from China. Doing a bang-up business with middle-aged women. Not my cup of tea, but more power to them.
If you don’t want a Hobby Lobby, don’t get one.
Nation of Outraged Wimenfolk
They defended Bill Clinton on charges of Rape, Workplace Sexual Harassment, and intimidating women who’d dare speak out about it because he supported their agenda on abortion.
They have no “gravitas”.
Minister and Clinic Escort: An Interview with Rev. Kathleen Green
Sally Steenland: I would like to focus on your work as a clinic escort in New Jersey. Can you paint a picture of what you do and say a few words about why a woman going to a reproductive health clinic would need an escort in the first place?
Kathleen Green: The picture is one in which volunteers arrive outside a clinic very early in the morning before the first patients arrive. The escorts are mostly women, some men, of varying ages and backgrounds and faith communities. When we arrive and gather together, we put on vests that identify us very clearly, to those who are working at the clinic and those who come to the clinic, as clinic volunteer escorts. We position ourselves on the sidewalk, which is right outside the front of the clinic. Women come from both sides of the sidewalk and from across the street, and so we are all along as a very obvious presence as escorts.
Our main purpose is to make sure that any woman who wants to go into the clinic can do so safely and with support. The women that come to the clinic are not all but are mostly, I would say, women of color. Many are from low-income households, and they come with their companions, who are boyfriends or husbands. We’ve seen women come with their mothers and grandmothers, with sisters and friends. So we are seeing quite a diversity of people who are choosing to come there for health care services.
Totowa-litarians.
***Protesters handed out leaflets to those entering and leaving the store, listing “7 reasons NOT to shop at Hobby Lobby.”***
They got paint, brushes, canvas, easels, drawing equipment, frames, leathercraft tools and lots of other goodies.
That is why I SHOP AT HOBBY LOBBY! Now if they just had a better selection of paints....
“I am so independent and empowered I need my male boss to pay for my chemical abortion.”
“No worries, they’ll just take all of those jobs somewhere else.”
Probably; that area is in the crosshairs of the Latino invasion of North Jersey, and they don’t do Hobby Lobby. The Anglo hags are fomenting their own disappearance from this Earth, while all around them Hispanics are breeding like rabbits...
“I am so independent and empowered I need my male boss to pay for my chemical abortion.”
The deranged rantings of women cast aside by their menfolk; no families for them, just recreational sex for the better-looking ones and loneliness for the rest...
There is no limit to the demands of the demented picketers.
If they must have recreational Sex they should consider how to handle the expense of such fun.
Hobby Lobby only chose not to pay for Abortifacients which are considered a form of abortion ,Get over it.
Think before you open yourself to Health Liabilities.
Just went to the site to see if there was one near me. There isn’t. But I’m not surprised that they’re attacked for another reason - all the girly, womanly stuff being sold. NOW must have a cow thinking of all those little girls making ruffled aprons.
And the sex for the better looking ones lasts just about as long as the fertility they suppress. By middle age they wind up lonely too.
The Unitarians were an offshoot of the UCC. The UCC (not to be confused with the more conservative Church of Christ) is also dead liberal, along with PCUSA, ECUSA, and ELCA.
“And the sex for the better looking ones lasts just about as long as the fertility they suppress. By middle age they wind up lonely too.”
True; then they become feminists...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.