Hobby Lobby: A Lesson from America

Not many people in Britain have followed the Hobby Lobby case, named after the American company that won an important battle for religious freedom against the bullying of the totalitarians - in this episode feminazis and supporters of state intervention in personal affairs.

In this area the United States seems more progressive in the true, not socialist, sense, and less prepared to submit to cultural Marxism's oppressive demands.

Hobby Lobby is a company owned by Christians. At issue was whether, according to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare, "closely held companies like Hobby Lobby could be forced by the government to provide abortifacient coverage to its employees, in defiance of its owners’ deeply held religious beliefs".

"In a 5-4 ruling written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby and other closely held companies do not have to provide contraceptive coverage that conflicts with the religious beliefs of the companies’ owners."

Non-profit companies already enjoy this dispensation, and now the government must provide religious accommodations to “closely-held” for-profit companies too. “Closely-held” means for example, as in this case, owned and controlled by members of a single family, as opposed to impersonal, publicly-held corporations.

One of the main reasons the Obama administration’s arguments failed to convince five justices is that the federal government did not necessarily need to mandate employer-provided contraceptive coverage in order to ensure access to contraceptive coverage. For example, rather than mandating employer coverage, the government could have easily established its own program to provide or pay for contraceptive coverage.

Like the the employees of non-profit companies that hold religious beliefs, the employees of for-profit companies with similar religious objections will still have access to insurance coverage without cost sharing for FDA-approved contraceptives; Hobby Lobby's objections concerned only abortifacient drugs, namely substances that induce abortion.

This is a very reasonable, well-though-out decision.

The way many (anything but) "liberals" reacted showed very clearly how the average IQ of Lefties is so much lower than that of conservatives and Right-wingers, very likely because it requires brains to oppose the dominant ideological orthodoxy, whereas any idiot can just unthinkingly follow the easy, lazy, non-intellectual path of going along with it.

A criticism of the Supreme Court’s decision from our politically-correct geniuses was that it denies women access to birth control, as if not being able to force someone to pay for something were the same as not having access to that something. In fact, bosses, by paying their employees a salary, enable them to pay for whatever they wish to buy.

Another "argument" was that the court ruling discriminated against women. In reality, the opposite is true, as "the only contraception-related discrimination baked into law by Obamacare was against men. After all, male contraception like condoms or vasectomies was never covered by the law".

The scream "It's not about abortion, but birth control!" showed the inability of some people to understand the difference between substances that prevent conception and substances that intervene after conception and destroy a fertilized egg. This case concerned only 4 types of contraception that can result in the destruction of a fertilized egg, while Hobby Lobby paid for 16 different types of non-abortive contraceptive coverage for its employees.

Some "pro-choice" brainboxes compared a human embryo to a fingernail: let's hope they don't choose medicine as their career.

"If you're going to argue human life doesn't begin at conception, the burden is on you to create human life in its absence" tweeted in reply Sean Davis of The Federalist.

But those contorted views do not represent the majority.

A Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely US voters found that they approve of the Supreme Court’s decision by a 10-point margin. 49% of them agreed that business owners should have the option of exempting themselves from ObamaCare’s HHS contraceptive mandate if it violates their religious beliefs. Only 39% opposed the Hobby Lobby court ruling, while 12% were undecided.

In addition, the poll found that 58 percent of voters say a company’s level of contraceptive coverage is not an important part of their decision to work there, compared to 38 percent who say it is at least somewhat important to their decision of where to work.

While 43 percent of voters think businesses should be required by law to provide health insurance that covers all government-approved contraceptives for women without copayment or other charges, 47 percent say companies should not be required to comply with the contraception mandate.

The same poll found that 48 percent of voters believe the government is a threat to Americans’ religious rights, while only 30 percent of voters believe the government protects those rights.