About this time a year ago, I asked a simple question. How did we get to the
situation in which craft store giant Hobby Lobby was to be fined more than a million
dollars a day? The fines were supposed to be levied due to the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. Although the fines were postponed, Hobby
Lobby has been in court and will be able to make its case before the Supreme Court.
Hobby Lobby has been an American success story. A business that started in an
Oklahoma garage has now grown to a business with $2 billion in sales and 13,500
employees working in 600 stores.
The Green family promotes biblical values in their company. They are debt-free
and donate 10 percent of the company’s income to charity. In their stores they play
Christian music and close on Sunday so their employees can spend time with church and
family. Hobby Lobby also pays well. They pay full-time employees a minimum wage of
$11 per hour.
All the Hobby Lobby employees are covered under the company’s self-insured
health plan. But they have a problem with one of the Obamacare mandates. The Green
family objects to being forced to pay for abortifacients like Plan B (the so-called morning
after pill) and Ella (the week after pill). The company is quite willing to provide good
health care for their employees but cannot in good conscience pay for abortion-inducing
drugs.
Some pro-abortion advocates have been spreading misinformation by saying that
Hobby Lobby is preventing women employees from having access to birth control. That
is not true. The Hobby Lobby health insurance plan covers nearly all of the
contraceptives approved by the FDA except the abortifacients just mentioned.
The case before the Supreme Court is whether the Obamacare mandate trump
religious liberty and freedom of conscience. Employees that want these abortifacients
could purchase them on their own. Hobby Lobby should not be forced to pay for them.
Hopefully the court will understand this and uphold religious freedom of conscience.