One year ago, this writer wrote a prophetic post about Hobby Lobby’s attempts to use their personal religious beliefs to screw over their employees. Here’s a brief excerpt:
However, there is a very scary paradigm emerging amongst the Religious Right. Example: Hobby Lobby tried to claim a religious exemption in order to undermine the care that their employees could get under the ACA. They said that the owners of the company had a religious objection to certain kinds of gynecological care, and so should be able to opt out of providing them to their workers.
Consider a more extreme (but highly probable) scenario: the First Church of Christ, Scientist. These people do not believe in medicine: they are faith-healers. So if your employers were Christian Scientists, they could deny you any and all health care coverage. You’d get nothing. Except, perhaps, for a bunch of nimrods praying by your bedside as you died of appendicitis.
Now they have made it to the Supreme Court, which seems sympathetic to the religious loons’ point of view. And that means there could be a ruling that would take away employees’ rights to birth control, and any other health care offerings that your employer may object to on religious grounds.
In addition, there is a deeper matter to consider: whether your employer’s religious beliefs are allowed to control yours. You see, Hobby Lobby doesn’t believe in birth control. And if you, as an employee, DO believe in birth control, well, tough rocks pal: your religious freedom is not as important as that of your employer.
Remember Animal Farm, where everyone was equal, but some were “more equal than others”? That is what the Supreme Court is all too likely to decide. Don’t scoff, they did it before with the Citizen’s United ruling, in which they decreed that while we all have the right to freedom of speech, rich people have more free speech than do the rest of us.
We are talking about a potential assault on the very principles on which our nation was founded, and on which our Constitution was based. The idea that your boss’s religious beliefs can overrule yours is not all that different from having your government’s religious beliefs likewise trump yours. This would completely take away our constitutional freedom of religion as hitherto guaranteed under the Establishment Clause.
The Supreme Court has the power via this ruling to take away your personal religious freedom, deny you access to health care, and potentially bankrupt you by taking away that access: pushing us further towards an Orwellian dystopia, all at a single stroke.
Not scared? Then you’re an idiot.
Mr. Blunt and Cranky
bluntandcranky 
Nobody is being forced to work for Hobby Lobby or for anyone else. A person who has a philosophical disagreement with his or her employer has the option to quit and go work somewhere else. An employer, like an individual and unlike government, is not prohibited from establishing an official religion to be mandated within the confines of its property. And an employee who is compelled by an employer to observe a particular faith during working hours is free to do otherwise on his or her own time. And I am not aware of anything in the ACA that prohibits an individual from declining an employer-provided health insurance plan and seeking a fully compliant plan on one of the exchanges.
That viewpoint assume that there are plenty of jobs available to change to. An academic argument, not one based on the reality of life in 21st-Century America.
BTW, I neglected to mention that people who don’t like Hobby Lobby’s policies are free not to do business with them. If enough people feel strongly enough about HL’s position on contraception and do something about it by boycotting them, they may be forced to change their policy or be forced out of business.
Thus the blog post.
Because securing shelter and feeding your family are totally optional.
Because finding a good job in a hollowed out economy is easy.
Because the working poor are known for their fighting spirit and devil may care attitude. Believing in magic-jebus or not has no impact on the selling of buttons and assorted craft crap.
I look forward to your support of the Al-Qaeda chain of stores where burqas and beards are the norm.
You keep treating faith as if it was not full of shit. This is the next list of religious exceptions that ‘religious companies’ wont cover.
“Contraception is no different from any other medicine. It improves the quality of life and saves lives. But if contraception were to go on the chopping block then here are 10 other therapies that employers could say falls foul of their religion and deny coverage:
1) Blood transfusions (Jehovah’s WItness)
2) Organ transplants (Jehovah’s Witness)
3) Antidepressants (Scientology)
4) Addiction medicine (Scientology)
5) In vitro fertilization (Catholicism)
6) Antibiotics (Christian Scientist)
7) Screening for sexually transmitted diseases (Catholicism, no one is ever having sex outside of marriage so STD screening is not needed)
8) Tissue and skin grafts that leave the body to be prepared for implant/use (Jehovah’s Witness)
9) Treatment of alcohol intoxication and alcohol abuse (Islam, Mormon and all the other religions that forbid alcohol consumption)
10) Treatment of trichinellosis (a parasitic brain worm) from pork consumption (Judaism)”
“If you work for me and get insurance through my company then you have to accept the kind of medicine that I believe in, evidence be damned!”
The fuq? Religious based objections should not overrule evidence based medicine.
Good points!