I am astonished that more Americans aren’t in an uproar about what is happening to Hobby Lobby right now. As many of you know, Hobby Lobby filed a lawsuit earlier this year to try and get relief from Obamacare’s abortion mandate. The case is still pending appeal, but the Supreme Court just rejected their request for an emergency injunction. In response, the Christian owners of Hobby Lobby have said they have no intention to pay for the abortion-inducing drugs required by Obamacare. That means that beginning on January 1, the United States government will fine Hobby Lobby $1.3 million dollars per day until Hobby Lobby complies.
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Who Is Hobby Lobby?
We all heard the news earlier this week about the death of religious freedom at Hobby Lobby. Even though the public is becoming aware that the owners David and Barbara Green are Christians, Americans still need to know more about these good people and what they stand for. To this end, Ben Domenech writes:
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Religious Liberty Dies at Hobby Lobby
Here’s the bad news from The Beckett Fund website: Today, a federal court denied a request to halt enforcement of the abortion pill mandate which forces the Christian-owned-and-operated Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., to providethe “morning after pill” and “week after pill” in their health insurance plan, or face crippling fines up to $1.3 million dollars per day… Hobby Lobby is the largest and first non-Catholic-owned business to file a lawsuit against the HHS mandate. The Green family has no moral objection to the use of preventive contraceptives and will continue covering preventive contraceptives for its employees. However, the Green family’s religious convictions prohibit them from providing or paying for the…
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Why the “Equality Act” is a disaster for religious liberty, and why we may be facing the disaster very soon.
The Associated Press reports on what the Democrats intend to do if they take back the House of Representatives this November. In short, they plan to introduce legislation that would be the biggest assault on religious liberty in our nation’s history. From the report: Just days ahead of a midterm election they hope will deliver them a majority, House Democrats are promising to prioritize anti-discrimination legislation that would for the first time establish widespread equal rights protections for LGBTQ individuals.
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Did President Trump just eliminate the contraceptive mandate on the first day?
Readers of this blog know that I have written extensively about Obamacare’s controversial contraceptive mandate. In fact, the most viral post I have ever written on this site was about this issue. The mandate has been controversial because it forces employers to provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients–even if those employers object to buying such coverage on religious grounds. The Christian owners of Hobby Lobby fought this all the way to the Supreme Court and won. But the problematic mandate still stands, and other cases are pending. President Trump signed an executive order that effectively overturns the contraceptive mandate. The order authorizes the HHS Secretary to eliminate administrative rules related…
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The difference between birth control and contraception
Karen Swallow Prior has written a crash-course in the difference between birth control and contraception at Christianity Today. If you didn’t know that there was a difference, this article is definitely for you. A couple of items here are noteworthy: 1. Prior takes on Rachel Held Evans and others who confuse “birth control” with other medicinal uses of the pill. She writes:
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A chilling new front in the war on religious liberty
The ACLU and other groups supporting gay rights have announced that they are withdrawing their support for the Employment Non-discrimination Act of 2013 (ENDA). ENDA is a controversial measure because the bill would make it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or sexual identity. Why would the ACLU and gay rights groups remove their support for such a measure? Because the current form of the bill provides an exemption for religious employers. The ACLU et al. have decided that the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision gives too much ground to religious liberty. To curtail that trend, these groups will not support the bill as long…
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Correcting the Record in light of Sec. Hillary Clinton’s false statements
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weighed-in on the Hobby Lobby decision yesterday (see above), and her analysis is so egregiously in error that I could not let it pass without some comment. She claims first of all that this is the first time that the Supreme Court has found that a corporation has religious freedom and thus that employers can impose their religious beliefs on employees. Now this is a curious characterization of yesterday’s opinion. Religious freedom does not give anyone—individual or corporate—the right to impose one’s beliefs upon someone else. Yet Clinton speaks as if the right of individuals to “impose their beliefs” has now been given to…
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The most consequential religious liberty case in a generation
One of the most important religious liberty cases in a generation will come before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties will be making their final appeal for an exemption from Obamacare’s coercive “contraceptive” mandate. Obamacare requires employers to provide health coverage for all FDA-approved contraceptive devices. So what’s the problem? Some of the devices—like IUD’s and morning-after pills—can cause abortions. The owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga are Christians and have said that they cannot in good conscience pay for coverage that can lead to killing an unborn human being. So these Christians have a choice. Either violate their conscience and provide coverage for abortion…
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The abortion mandate still stands
The Obama administration announced “updates” this morning to Obamacare’s abortion mandate. The original mandate was a shell-game, and this latest “change” is only more of the same. The original rule required religious employers to pay money to an insurance company that would then provide abortion-inducing drugs for employees that wanted them. That is still true today despite the overhyped announcement. There’s no substantive difference. The changes are cosmetic at best. The underlying religious objection has not been addressed, and employers would still be morally implicated in paying for abortion-inducing drugs for their employees.
