How Hobby Lobby Ruined My Favorite Hobby

I love crafts. Really, I do. It's shameful and awkward that one of my largest expenses this month was a new stock of glitter and mod podge (among other crafting "necessities"). While I was making my last unreasonable craft-binge purchases I found myself walking across a shopping plaza to Beverly's (by no means the best craft store around, but they keep the glitter and spray varnish stocked and that's all one can really ask for) and found myself getting angry at the whole craft universe. Not because nearly every surface in my parents' house (and also the roof of my mother's car...don't even ask) has at least one form of glue permanently stuck to its surface from previous adventures. Not because glitter really is the herpes of arts and crafts. Not because my projects almost never turn out as easy or flawless as the pictures on Pinterest would lead me to believe. No, I became so incensed that I had to take a lap of the parking lot because my trip to Beverly's brought the Supreme Court's ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. back to the forefront of my mind. 

For those of you who somehow have not heard, Hobby Lobby is a craft store chain whose super-Christian owners have decided that they don't have to provide their female employees with insurance that covers birth control pills because they don't believe in abortion. Oh, and the Supreme Court of the United States has decided to agree with them. So let's talk about this. Let's pull away some of the levels of how wrong and upsetting this is and see if we can get down to the very root of how wrong and upsetting this is.  

First off, birth control pills have nothing to do with abortion. They stop women from getting pregnant. An abortion terminates an existing pregnancy. If women aren't pregnant, they can't get an abortion. Therefore, if women are on the pill, they can't also get an abortion. In fact, limiting women's family planning options (like, I don't know, refusing to give them health insurance that covers the pill or something) leads to an increased rate of abortions because more women who are denied family planning measures will now be getting pregnant by accident. 

Let's go through that one more time: If you make it easy for women to not get pregnant, then they won't need to terminate those pregnancies. See how magically that works out?

Furthermore, despite their name, birth control pills are used to treat approximately a million things completely separate from the little side-effect of not getting pregnant, including everything from bad acne to an irregular period. This is a completely valid medical treatment for completely valid medical conditions, with minimal side effects and are amazing available and (unless you work for a corporation owned by super-Christian, super-ignorant, sexist jerks who doesn't understand how concepts like freedom and medicine work) are probably covered by your insurance (and the ACA made them free, bringing family planning to low-income women in an unprecedentedly awesome way). So really, what this Hobby Lobby crap is doing is undermining the ability of women to receive access to legitimate medical treatment. I'm going to say that again just to make sure it sinks all the way in: Hobby Lobby's owners and people like them are fundamentally undermining the ability of their female employees to access legitimate medical treatment as prescribed by a doctor. Hobby Lobby's owners are forcing women to pay out of pocket for medications that they need based on a completely false conception of what birth control pills even do. They're replacing real science and medicine with rough guesstimates of how women work, and lots and lots and lots of religion. 

While we're on the subject, let's talk about religion. More specifically, let's talk about my first amendment freedom of religion rights. Now, it's true that every American has the freedom to practice whatever religion they want, but it's also true that every American has the freedom from other people's religions. Religion cannot be forced on people, because that would be a violation of their first amendment religious rights. Forcing people to live by the rules of your religion is unconstitutional, not to mention pretty much the reason our country was founded in the first place. Forcing women to go without legitimate medication (which, just as a note, really isn't made any less legitimate if it's used solely as a contraceptive rather than as treatment for a separate condition, but that's a rant big enough for a whole other post) just because you think that your religion is against it (which really is arguable since the people in charge of Hobby Lobby and apparently also SCOTUS have no conception of how birth control pills actually work). You can't force people to abide by the tenants of your religion. That's the most beautiful thing about America: freedom. Hobby Lobby's owners and people like them love to rant about their religious freedoms, but at the complete exclusion of the religious freedoms of their employees. That's wrong. That's oppression. That's robbing your employees of their rights based on your personal belief system, which doesn't seem like something that Jesus would be down with. News flash: no one else in the world actually has to care about your belief system. If you try to make them care, then you are being a jerk and you should probably stop. 

This is a trend that we see in a lot of so-called controversies in this country. Honestly, if something offends you, and you think its sinful, then don't do it. If you think abortion is wrong, then don't get an abortion. If you think gay marriage is wrong, then have fun living a heterosexual lifestyle. But just because you don't agree with something doesn't mean that people who don't share your religious beliefs can't have things that they want and need. That's not exercising your religious freedoms, that's persecution of people who see the world differently. That's limiting other people's rights to not hold religious beliefs. I don't proscribe to religion. I think that marriage should be a union between any two consenting adults and I think that abortion is a medical procedure better administered by doctors than preachers or politicians. I am not alone in these beliefs, and despite the road this country is cruising down no one is entitled to crush my beliefs because their religion says so. Religion should be a personal relationship between a person and their god, and they should really keep everyone else out of it. We're all intelligent adults capable of making our own choices, including the choice not to believe what you believe.

Now we get into the super upsetting part (because none of this was the super upsetting part). Hobby Lobby's owners argued that Hobby Lobby is a Christian company, so they can't do anything that interferes with Hobby Lobby's own belief system. Bigger news flash: Hobby Lobby doesn't have a belief system. It doesn't have religion. It doesn't have an opinion about abortion. Hobby Lobby is not a conscious entity. Why? Because it is a corporation, and regardless of SCOTUS's terrible mistakes I will never pretend that corporations are people too. Why not? For the incredibly simple reason that they are not people. There is no reason to make that claim except that some people who own corporations want to have them recognized as such to topple American democracy as we know it through ridiculous campaign finance shenanigans and apparently also deprive their employees of basic human rights like health care. 

Corporations are not people. Corporations are inanimate abstractions. They aren't even concrete things. They are tools created by humans and owned by humans. You cannot own people in the United States, and haven't been able to in kind of a while. While I understand that the Bible has some other ideas on the subject, and so maybe the people that own Hobby Lobby are a little unclear on this concept as well, the fact remains that you cannot own another person in the United States. Abraham Lincoln (a Republican, until he ditched them for the National Union Party) made that kind of a priority. You can own a corporation. You, as the owner of a corporation are entitled to religious freedoms as proscribed in the First Amendment, but your corporation doesn't have religion. It doesn't have beliefs. It isn't a sentient being. It also doesn't have memories, hopes and dream, thoughts, feelings, friends, family, or pretty much anything else that defines what it is to be human. (This is also a rant for another post.)

Finally, there's the incredible hypocrisy of the Hobby Lobby people. They claim that they exercise Christian Charity by paying their employees above minimum wage, but here's the thing: paying someone for work they do cannot ever be called charity. It's a legal imperative (because, once again, slavery is illegal in the United States). Paying people above minimum wage, which is pretty universally regarded as an unlivable standard, doesn't make you a good person. Not paying people above minimum wage (aka not paying people a living wage) makes you a bad person. It's that simple. Compensating people for work they do for you such that they can afford to live should really be the bare minimum of standards that we have for businesses. It doesn't make you a good person or a good Christian. It kind of just makes you break even. Furthermore, they say that they are so against abortion that they refuse to allow their employees access to drugs that have nothing to do with abortion (and, as I stated above, prevent abortions from taking place by preventing unplanned/unwanted pregnancies) and yet most of their products come from China. As is spelled out in this fantastic article, China, in addition to using so really unethical labor practices that are probably also un-Christian in some way, is super into abortion. In fact, a nasty side-effect of their One-Child Policy is that the government has been known to force women to abort pregnancies. This points to a larger problem, in which the Hobby Lobby case is not now and never was about religion, but rather about politics. This isn't about women's access to family planning, it's about causing as many problems for the Obama administration as possible. That is an irresponsible waste of time and energy, and also selfish beyond words. Using innocent people as a vehicle for causing petty annoyances to the president is morally wrong. Depriving people of adequate health care due to your political affiliations is not only wrong, but not a federally-protected freedom. It's just being a bully.

In conclusion, SCOTUS has made some mistakes, and this one is up there with Separate but Equal and Citizens United. This is fundamentally wrong on a million different levels. This is conservative Christians reaching into my uterus and telling me what I can and can't do with it. This is corporations getting treated like people and people getting treated like crap. This is wrong and immoral. This is letting people be bullies. This is letting money buy power. Most of all, this is a slippery slope. Hiding discrimination behind religion is a terrible, terrible thing. This ruling now sets a precedent for "closely-held" (which is a non-specific term to say the least) corporations can justify doing whatever awful, discriminatory things they want, and couch it in religious freedom. That's not how religious freedom works. As you can tell by the length of this post, this ruling is upsetting on a lot of levels. Now, every time I go to a craft store I have to think about all the ways in which this country is allowing the freedom of its citizens to be undermined by corporations. So thanks to the sexist dirtbags who own Hobby Lobby, for turning crafting into an angering and frustrating process fraught with gender inequality and terrible Supreme Court rulings. I just wanted to glue glitter to things.

Until next time,
Isabel.