Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for April 04, 2014

Oooo! I can get L% off?

Boycott Hobby Lobby! If they win in court it could be the slippery slope to a non- democratic theocracy.

They should have home-schooled it.

Misses the point. They have the right to be lunatics without being forced by government fiat to provide services to either customers or employees their beliefs prohibit, just as no one is forced to shop there, or work there. Mock and criticize their beliefs all you want, that’s legal. Force them to break it by government force, and you’re as bad as anyone else who forces another to break their personal conviction.

One might as well say that a Jewish butcher should provide pork to gentile customers and employees because they demand it and the majority of people don’t believe in keeping kosher.

I think TheGunrunnerRimbaud misses the point. To run with his Jewish Butcher: while the whole kosher thing is utterly looney, there is no reason why he should be forced to sell anything (let alone pork). What he shouldn’t be allowed to do is to refuse to sell to certain classes of customer. Similarly the Hobby-lobbyists can believe whatever rot they wish, but shouldn’t be able to force their daftness onto their customers nor onto their employees.Of course the real solution to this sort of foolishness is the have a decent one-payer health service (like a decent developed country) and remove it from the current stupidity of basing it on employment.

i do the only possible thing i can do…i don’t go there.i don’t like religion shoved down my throat, even my own.

I see no difference between one or the other. A non-Christian hobbyist is about as inconvenienced by the Hobby Lobby being an explicitly Christian company as a gentile pork lover is by a Jewish butcher. One merely takes their business and money elsewhere.

See, I believe that others have a right to believe and practice things that I not only disagree with, but personally find odious without being punished by the government or anyone other than individuals banding together and expressing their disagreement by public lack of patronage. I like to call it tolerance.

Hobby Lobby (or to be precise, the Green family) only decided that covering contraception was morally offensive after ACA passed. Before that, they were just fine with it. Also, my health care is not a gift from my employer. It is compensation, which I earn by doing my job. It is not my employer’s business what I use my health insurance to buy, any more than it is their business what I spend my pay on.

Boycotts speak louder than any words. If you don’t like ‘em, don’t do business with ‘em. If you really, really don’t like their policies, petition and organize boycotts. If you think what they’re doing is illegal, get the Law involved. When and why did owners and CEOs and Boards decide it was in the company’s best interest to impose their beliefs onto the company “mission”? Other than doing anything illegal, who cares what the Boss believes? I’m an atheist. I suspect there are companies that (or is it ‘who’?) would refuse to do business with me if they knew, and if the bosses imposed their ideals on the store. I think they’re too smart to do that in most cases. Most, not all…. Gotta run, Chick-Fil-A opens in 10 minutes…

Just read where Hobby Lobby invests in the companies that manufacture the birth control devices they don’t want to “provide” for their employees. Hypocrisy, thy name is Hobby Lobby!

Once a sum of money (cash or payment for insurance) is given over to an employee for services rendered, it no longer belongs to the employer and isn’t in their control. Hobby Lobby seems to think that if they’ve ever touched a bill, it’s theirs to dictate forever what it can’t be spent on. (Not unlike the ‘double taxation’ nonsense the Republicans were on about a while back.)

Hobby Lobby also does extensive business with a country that forces abortions on some of its people, and has no intention of stopping, because it’s so important that they can buy goods made at rock bottom prices by workers in unsafe Chinese factories.

I just dumped my employee’s healthcare. Problem solved. My “Corporation” agrees, since I tell it what to do. I don’t owe anybody, anything. No one makes people work for anybody.

cheap laughs making fun of other’s beliefs. I like it better when TTDB is actually funny.

Hobby Lobby doesn’t have a problem investing in and profiting from companies that make and sell birth control products .

Hobby Lobby uses Chinese made products and invests in companies that make IUDs. So what? Most Christians are a-okay with war, despite pretty explicit biblical pacificism. Most Jews wear polyweave clothes, despite Leviticus. Religion doesn’t make sense, doesn’t operate on logic and people can be hypocrites. That’s the thing, in this country: you can pick and choose which parts of illogic you feel strongly about, and as long as you’re not forcing people to follow you, you have the right to do so. That’s part of freedom and free association. No one has to shop at or work for Hobby Lobby. It’s wrong to force people to violate their conscience even if it is stupid. They have the right to be stupid, just as they have the right to sell and purchase certain products and close on Sundays.

I was unaware that hobbyist materials like colored pipe cleaners and glue guns were such a vital need that the constitution mandates that providers serve the public interest in manner like the electric company.

The owners of the corporation have a belief that is shared by only a small number of their employees. The fact that they would like to deprive all of their employees of equal protection on that basis suggests to me that they are asking that their own religion be given preferential status… and THAT strikes me as being a violation of the establishment clause.

There seems to be a general policy that a business that serves the public has to serve all of it. You can’t turn away a customer or potential employee because of their race or religion.Perhaps Hobby Lobby needs to reorganize as a church or religious non-profit rather than as a corporation. Churches can restrict membership to those who agree with the tenets of the faith without being seen as discriminatory. Religious non-profits can only discriminate up to a certain point, however. They may not be able to discriminate by refusing to hire outside of their faith but the courts have decided that they can withhold this particular benefit from employees who do not share their faith.

I sat next to a corporation in church. It had tentacles and was smoking opium, and then fell asleep. After the service it tried to eat the minister’s hand, and peed on the church bulletin board. But we forgave it and now it’s absorbing the children, and by so doing keeping the others in line! True story.