Tilting at Windmills

About a year ago, David Green, the founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., published a letter saying that, because of the onerous requirements of the ACA, he may have to close his business.  Hobby Lobby has over 500 stores in 41 states, and it is very popular here in the center of the country, so naturally it will be missed if they go out.  The problem centers around the ACA's requirement that insurance policies provided by employers must include coverage for emergency birth control.  Hobby Lobby asserts that the birth control methods that will be covered cause abortions (the medical industry refutes that), and that they should be allowed an exemption based on the owner's religious beliefs.  Lower courts have all ruled that as a for-profit company, religious exemptions that would be given to a non-profit religious organization, such as a church, would not apply to them.  The case will be going to the Supreme Court, but a District Court Judge has given them a reprieve while the case is pending.
    Mr. Green's letter makes the rounds on Facebook, and I see it fairly frequently.  Last night it popped up on my newsfeed, posted by an old co-worker who I like to keep in touch with.  In the last few months, she's gotten more into identity politics, and her posts have reflected that.  Sometimes I'll say something about a particular post, but not often.  On this one, though, I had a piece of information that had cast the case in a new light for me, and I felt it was worth sharing.  All along Mr. Green and his supporters have been presenting their point of view as a religious liberty issue.  Yet in 25 of the 41 states they operate in, the state laws require the same coverage for birth control as the ACA.  So why now?  Why this law and not the others?  To me, this says that the case is less about religious liberty than it is about anti-ACA partisan politics.  But that's just my opinion, and I'm less inclined to give you my opinion than I am to tell you about the information I have that led me to my opinion, so that's what I did.
    The only thing was that I wasn't sure I had stated it correctly, so I started hunting for a couple of my sources to make sure of my numbers.  While I was doing that, my computer made that ♫baLUNG♫ sound it makes when someone has responded to something you've posted.  I checked, and one of my friend's friends had had responded with "Ron: that is bs or their lawsuit wouldn't have reached the Supreme Court."  Now, I love a good discussion, and I was pleased that someone was trying to start one, but his comment was only an opinion and no substantiation, so it was a slow start.
    I continued my search for the data I was looking for, and discovered that, yes indeed, my numbers were wrong.  I also snagged a graphic from a youtube video to illustrate part of the info. Then I used all that to correct my original entry, and make the point a bit stronger.  Then I remembered that I had also seen an article in the Journal Record about some plans that Hobby Lobby had for the future, and I had to look that up as well.  In doing so, I found that there were a lot of  other articles on the same theme.  My comment:  "Also, about a month after the above letter came out, May of 2013, The Journal Record reported that HL bought a huge piece of property down by their headquarters in 2012, and had announced that they intended to build some massive warehouses. Subsequent issues reported some other business expansions they were planning."
    His response: "Are they not free to acquire property? What is your point? They are a family owned business, they can do as they please with their assets."  And, of course, he's absolutely right. 
    I conceded, "It could have no relevance. The incongruity of the 'we're closing' and 'we're expanding' messages just struck me as interesting. But of course, they should plan for a positive future."
    He went on: "The "government" has a lot of bearing on whether private companies will be coerced to pay for things they religiously object to, Obozocare being the present topic."  He then changed the subject entirely.  "I would love to see this edict forced on Muslims."
    Only I didn't realize he'd changed the subject.  I thought we were still talking about private companies being coerced to pay for things they religiously objected to, and I thought it was an opening to explain why Hobby Lobby wasn't having much luck in the courts.  So I said, "Or Jehovah's Witnesses. Imagine if your boss was a Jehovah's Witness and he had to provide health care plans that paid for blood transfusions.  Wouldn't that be awful.  Or if he was a Christian Scientist and had to provide a plan that paid for, well, doctors."
    He said, "Don't change the subject."
    Huh what?  "That is the subject."
    "Your buddy is a Muslim and so he excluded them."
    *Sigh*  Okay, so he gets his news from chain emails.  So many places to go with this, but I decided to focus on the exclusion bit. 
    Now, all the fact checking sites have done treatments on this.  Snopes gave it a "false" rating,   Politifact.com gave a Pants-on-fire rating, and Factcheck.org expounded on why it wasn't true.  So it would be easy to just post a link to any of them.  But, when possible, I prefer to go to the original.  I said, "Show me," and posted a link to the online version of the ACA.
    Then he did something that both surprised and pleased me.  He posted a link to the above mentioned Factcheck.org article.  It surprised me because I wasn't expecting him to concede anything, and here he is posting a link to an article that completely refutes what he just said.  It pleased me because he put up something that was more than just an opinion.  But he also decided to close the conversation at that point.  "I don't have time for you fella. Have a blessed life."
    I work nights, as you all know, and it was getting late in the evening and events of the day had prevented me from going to bed.  So I was glancing at the clock and trying to find a way to gracefully bow out of the conversation.  His decision to leave was welcomed, but only because I was getting tired.  "G'nite," I said, then happily went on to other things.

Following the Supreme Court's decision on the Hobby Lobby matter on June 30, 2014, the New York Times  published an editorial that I found expressed my point of view perfectly.  I copied it as a blog post here.