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Hobby Lobby and the Truth

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Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Weekend Contributor

Unless you have been in a coma the last few weeks, you have probably heard of or read about the Hobby Lobby case recently argued in front of the United States Supreme Court.  Hobby Lobby is challenging a section of the Affordable Care Act that requires companies to provide medical insurance for their employees or pay a fine.  The mandate also requires the insurance to include coverage for contraception services.  Services that its owners claim violates their religious beliefs.

“…. the battle for its Christian identity was revived this week when lawyers for the company argued before the Supreme Court that the company should not have to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. The issue, says Hobby Lobby co-founder Barbara Green, isn’t that the company wants to meddle with women’s rights to take contraceptive drugs. “We’re not trying to control that,” she said. “We’re just trying to control our participation in it.” ‘ Reader Supported News

Mrs. Green claims they are not trying to control their female employees use of contraceptives, but the network of causes that they are involved with seem to indicate that the Greens want to mix their religious views into everyone else’s business.

When you dig a little deeper, the facts indicate that the donations made by the Green family and their related businesses and executives, display an attempt to force their religious beliefs on others.

“But a document published here for the first time reveals Hobby Lobby appears to be going much further than protecting freedom, providing funding for a group that backs a political network of activist groups deeply engaged in pushing a Christian agenda into American law. The document shows entities related to the company to be two of the largest donors to the organization funding a right-wing Christian agenda, investing tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars into a vast network of organizations working in concert to advance an agenda that would allow businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians and deny their employees contraceptives under a maximalist interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution.

That network of activist groups has succeeded in passing legislation in Arizona requiring women to undergo an ultrasound before an abortion, banning taxpayer-funded insurance paying for government employees’ abortions, defining marriage as a union between a man and woman, and funding abstinence education. And there’s evidence that its efforts go well beyond the borders of the Copper State.” Reader Supported News

The above efforts by Hobby Lobby and its owners seems to conflict with Mrs. Greens claim that they are not trying to meddle with women’s right to use contraceptives.  Just how deeply is Hobby Lobby involved in these organizations funding and assisting with these efforts to restrict other citizens of their freedoms?

“Hobby Lobby-related entities are some of the biggest sources of funding to the National Christian Charitable Foundation, which backed groups that collaborated in promoting the anti-gay legislation in Arizona – recently vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer – that critics say would have legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians by businesses.

The path of SB 1062 to the Arizona statehouse was built by two groups, the Center for Arizona Policy and the Alliance Defending Freedom. Center for Arizona Policy employees regularly spoke in favor of the legislation, appearing as the grass-roots face of a bill that the center’s president, Cathi Herrod, characterized as “[making] certain that governmental laws cannot force people to violate their faith unless it has a compelling governmental interest–a balancing of interests that has been in federal law since 1993,” according to a statement on the group’s website. (One hundred and twenty-three Center for Arizona Policy-supported measures have been signed into law; its legislative agenda ranges from requiring intrusive ultrasounds for women seeking abortions to HB 2281, a bill that, if passed by the Arizona Senate, would exempt religious institutions from paying property taxes on leased or rented property.)

For its part, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a national Christian organization based in Arizona, works toward the “spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system and advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family,” according to the group’s website. Both groups are heavily funded by the National Christian Charitable Foundation, “the largest Christian grant-making foundation in the world,” as described on the group’s website. And who is the largest funder of National Christian Charitable? That would be a Hobby Lobby executive.” Reader Supported News

It would appear to this reader that Hobby Lobby does quite a bit more than just look after protecting what it considers its own religious rights.  Their donations and efforts are geared toward making their religious beliefs the law of the land.  They seem to think the Free Exercise Clause allows them to dictate how other people have to exercise their lives.  Just how much money has Hobby Lobby and its executives donated to the cause of transforming the legal system?

“In 2011, the National Christian Charitable Foundation contributed $9,606,281.88 of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s $36,379,373 grant revenue. That same year, the NCF contributed $236,250 of the Center for Arizona Policy’s $1,662,355 in grant revenue.

Overall, from 2002 to 2011 the NCF contributed $1,481,343 to the Center for Arizona Policy and $31,024,584.30 to the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Typically the trail would stop there. The National Christian Charitable Foundation appears to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, single contributor to the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Center for Arizona Policy, but because the foundation is a massive-donor advised fund, its donors are shielded from public scrutiny.

However, a 2009 NCF tax filing, reported here for the first time, offers insights into the deep pockets backing National Christian Charitable Foundation.

The form, viewable here, shows a total of nearly $65 million in contributions coming from a combination of Jon Cargill, who is the CFO of Hobby Lobby, and “Craft Etc.,” an apparent misspelling of Crafts Etc., a Hobby Lobby affiliate company. The document shows that Hobby Lobby‑related contributions were the single largest source of tax-deductible donations to National Christian Charitable’s approximately $383.785 million in 2009 grant revenue.

According to addresses on the filing, both the contributions from Crafts Etc. and Jon Cargill came from a massive warehouse and office facility housing Hobby Lobby’s headquarters in Oklahoma City.” Reader Supported News

Notwithstanding Mrs. Greens earlier claims, Hobby Lobby seems to be deeply involved in the business of pushing their religious beliefs upon their employees and upon citizens in many states where laws have been introduced or passed at the behest of the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Center for Arizona Policy and the National Christian Charitable Foundation.  I wonder how Hobby Lobby would react if another business sued for the ability to subtract a percentage of its taxes on the grounds that their religion does not allow their tax money to be spent on any military expenses?

Is Hobby Lobby fibbing when they claim that they are merely trying to protect their own religious beliefs when they are sending millions of dollars to causes intent on making their religious beliefs the law of the land?  Hobby Lobby buys millions of products from China and other countries that have a variety of policies and laws that a good Christian would not agree with or which might violate their religious beliefs.  Shouldn’t Hobby Lobby boycott those countries products that are produced under slave like conditions, or in countries that have forced abortion laws?

What do you think?

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692 thoughts on “Hobby Lobby and the Truth”

  3. Karen,
    Medicaid is not true single payer. It is the government funding private insurance companies. In our state, there are a number of insurance companies which manage it. Some of them are so awful many doctors won’t take Medicaid managed by certain companies, but will take others. The government gives the company the money to pay for patient care. Corporate management is still profit driven.

    1. Charlton Stanley wrote: “Medicaid is not true single payer. It is the government funding private insurance companies.”

      I always thought Medicaid paid the health care providers directly, but I guess with Obamacare, now maybe they pay the insurance companies?

      By your perspective, I guess that technically, Canada isn’t true single payer either then because they actually pay private companies to provide the care. In contrast, Great Britain would be true single payer from your perspective.

  4. Good grief, you didn’t read it carefully did you? It did cover ER wait times and access.

    1. Annie – my bad, I missed it. You were right.

      “U.S. patients reported relatively longer waiting times for doctor appointments when they were sick, but relatively shorter waiting times to be seen at the ER, see a specialist, and have elective surgery. Specifically:
      The percentage of U.S. patients who waited six days or more for a doctor appointment when sick was not significantly different from the rate in Canada (23% v. 36%), the worst-performing country.
      Only 47 percent of U.S. patients were able to see a doctor on the same or next day when sick, versus 61 percent to 81 percent of patients in the four better-performing nations.
      U.S. patients were less likely than patients in Canada (12% v. 24%) but more likely than patients in Germany (4%) to wait four hours or more to be seen in the emergency department.
      U.S. patients were less likely than patients in four countries (except Germany) to wait four weeks or longer to see a specialist (23% v. 40%–60%) or to wait four months or longer for elective surgery (8% v. 19%–41%) (Schoen et al. 2005).”

      You will notice that US patients were 50% less likely to spend 4 or more hours in the emergency room.

    1. Annie – that had nothing to do with ERs. Canadian patients actually waited longer than US patients to get an appt. according to this data.

    1. annie – do you have access to statistics on wait times in Canadian ERs?

  7. Charlton – your story brings back the frustration of my sister-in-law arguing with a Medicaid representative with no medical background whatsoever why her daughter needed liquid medications for her feeding tube, instead of pills that would clog it when crushed and dissolved.

    That’s why the American public hated HMOs, for similar tactics, and yet, here we are, bring back a similar model. It’s like we have no memory, sometimes.

  8. David:

    That’s awful. People of low character will always succumb to temptation. If there is a way to abuse a system, it will happen. I support addressing abuses and fraud, as well as improving transportation options.

  9. Annie and Elaine:

    It is true that here in the US, the uninsured clog ERs with non-emergency issues that the hospital is required to pay for. That was the reason why ERs closed in AZ where they had a crush of illegal, uninsured immigration. It overwhelmed the system.

    Medicaid expansion accompanied a surge in ER visits (http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/02/science/la-sci-sn-expanding-medicaid-increases-emergency-room-visits-study-finds-20140102).

    I absolutely agree that health care reform is needed. Most people do. Addressing the non-emergency use of ERs is one of those reasons. I would prefer that we had community clinics to meet those needs, to reduce those who die in ER waiting rooms. We just disagree about what to do about it.

    As average wait times in Canada for elective procedures reached 19 WEEKS, Canadians with money fled to the US for treatment: http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/11/report-thousands-fled-canada-for-health-care-in-2011/

    Do you want to wait 19 WEEKS for a procedure and pay higher taxes? Because I don’t. And that’s for a country with less population, and less immigration strains than we have. We should not repeat an experiment and expect a different result.

    1. Karen – when Janet Napolitano was governor of Arizona she railed at the administration to have them repay Arizona for the medical costs incurred for treating illegal immigrants. Oddly, when she became head of Homeland Security, she let more of them into the country. Now she is Chancellor of the University of California. I look forward to seeing what happens.

  10. If a patient pays zero for health care (disregarding the increased taxes required to pay for it), he will go to the doctor the first second he sneezes, clogging wait lines.

    If a patient pays a copy for health care, he will triage himself, and go if he feels it’s necessary.

  11. Hi Annie:

    Countries with socialized medicine typically try to triage patients, with preference given to emergency cases. This results in wait times of months to get procedures done, in some cases. They are unable to meet the demand of most patients in a timely manner, as compared to private health insurance. Since there are longer waits for most procedures, one can reasonably assume that they would have similar delays in dealing with a health crisis like a plague.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9591814/Patients-starve-and-die-of-thirst-on-hospital-wards.html

    NHS death pathway:
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161869/Top-doctors-chilling-claim-The-NHS-kills-130-000-elderly-patients-year.html

  12. Wow!! In Canada if you break an ankle they’ll treat you in an ER. Where do I sign up??? Oh wait, that’s a given in the US, even if you’re a criminal or homeless.

  13. Hi RTC:

    You might like this article about evolutionary theories behind homosexuality.
    http://www.adherents.com/misc/paradoxEvolution.html

    I worked in a very small way on an AIDS study, waaaaaaay back in the Cretaceous Period. The patient files would bring me to tears. There would be entries that the patient was doing well, and then a few months later he would crash and pass away. I’ve read so many clinically detached descriptions of final days, and I don’t want anyone to have to go through that anymore.

    The virus is a blood-borne pathogen that kills its host, but slowly enough that it has the opportunity to spread to other victims.

    Having read through patient files with real tragedies, what frustrates me beyond belief is that this virus could be beaten back to a rare illness if people would use prophylactics, every time, if they have multiple partners, or be monogamous, and not share needles. Everyone has his own personal code of morality. This is biology. Blood-borne pathogens are spread by body fluids. And yet, there is a shockingly high percentage of men who know they are HIV-infected who have unprotected sex with multiple partners. Which means their partners don’t value their own health enough to be protected, every time.

    This isn’t airborne, where you are helpless to protect yourself. In most cases, transmission can be prevented.

    But the young think they are immortal, many people falsely think AIDS is not a problem anymore, and “condom fatigue” has set in. That is actually one reason behind my problem with making 20 contraceptives “free” with no copay, regardless of financial status. Men can now reasonably presume their female partners have access to free contraceptives, and they don’t need to financially contribute to their sexual relationship. Statistically, too many men are not using prophylactics and protecting their partners. It is a reasonable assumption that making contraceptives free will cause an inevitable increase in STDs, including HIV. Again, this was an attempt to help people that I firmly believe will lead to negative consequences.

  15. Long wait times in the ER were because people were using it for things that they put off taking care of until I was an emergency because they had no healthcare. The more people who get healthcare and a doctor of heir own, the less busy the ER will become.

  16. Karen, I was referring to emergent care in countries with socialized health care. I was in Canada, London, Ontario visiting my cousin when she broke her ankle, I went with her to the ER, she was seen immediately.

  17. Hi RTC:

    If HL cancelled its insurance policies for all of its employees, and took the fine, those employees would likely be stuck with Exchange policies. For the reasons stated above, I find those provide substandard access to doctors, while being expensive without subsidies. Typically, employer-provided health insurance is much less expensive for the employee. We can all make assumptions about how much money HL would be willing to pay to make this go away. But, to me, it would be grossly unfair if this culminated in their employees losing their insurance, altogether. I suspect, and this is only my opinion, that HL will try their case in court. If they lose, they will do a cost analysis on the fine for their employees, and decide how to proceed.

    And I think that we are in agreement that the primary biological function of sex is reproduction, but that there are a great many emotional and physical benefits. There is no value judgement. For instance, the act is not “lessened” in some way because a couple is childless, for whatever reason.

    As for the sub-prime mortgage crisis, how much time do you have? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac historically required A-paper (great credit, 20% down.) Both of those factors mitigate risk; someone is less likely to walk away from a house if he has 20% of his own money invested in it. But that meant that everyone else had to rent. Every single time that the credit and downpayment restrictions loosen for Fannie and Freddie, it is inevitably followed by a wave of foreclosures. There is a reason why banks prefer good credit and money down. If someone walked up to me and said he has a credit report showing he hasn’t repaid his debts very well, and has no savings of his own, but will I please loan him hundreds of thousands of dollars, I would be concerned about the risk. Obviously. But Congress decided that “home ownership should be a right.” And it allowed sub-prime loans, encouraged no money down loans, because it wanted more people to own the roof over their heads. And to allay banks’ fears, they allowed them to be bundled with low-risk loans and sold off to investors. The risk was supposed to be spread around. And the banks were given the carrot/stick approach – their “compliance” with CRA was used as the basis for approving new branches. So banks went hog-wild, giving loans they never would have approved, because they thought they were protected by bundling and selling these loans. So the % of high-risk loans became higher, and unsuspecting investors bought supposedly low-risk mortgage securities that were, in fact, heavily seeded with loans sure to fail. Calls to investigate and regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were ignored. And when the bubble inevitably burst (again) many politicians openly admitted that they greatly regretted failing to regulate.

    So, the banks were not innocent, but they were encouraged in their excess.

    And the people who were harmed the most were those families whose American Dream of homeownership ended in foreclosure and ruined credit. I always try to look for long-term effects, and here were efforts to help a population that harmed them.

    I would have supported other ways to help people achieve the dream of homeownership – counseling by financial advisors on how to improve their credit, save, lower expenses . . . all ways that would actually IMPROVE their overall lifestyle. Not just dump them with a house they can’t afford with the same issues that caused their bad credit to begin with, while hoping for a different result.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

  18. One of the causes for long waits in emergency rooms has been the people who have no health care insurance and no primary care doctors to care for them when they have medical/health problems. These people often waited until their problems became so severe that they had to get medical attention…so they went to the emergency room.

    Check out EMTALA (The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act)
    http://www.acep.org/News-Media-top-banner/EMTALA/

    Excerpt:

    Main Points

    – The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) is a federal law that requires anyone coming to an emergency department to be stabilized and treated, regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay, but since its enactment in 1986 has remained an unfunded mandate.

    – The burden of uncompensated care is growing, closing many emergency departments, decreasing resources for everyone and threatening the ability of emergency departments to care for all patients.

    1. Elaine M wrote: “One of the causes for long waits in emergency rooms has been the people who have no health care insurance and no primary care doctors to care for them when they have medical/health problems. These people often waited until their problems became so severe that they had to get medical attention…so they went to the emergency room.”

      That’s a nice storyline, but it does not represent reality here in Florida. Everyone here has had access to health care long before Obamacare was considered. County taxes pay for it. People going to the county health clinics pay on a sliding scale according to their ability to pay. Even a middle class person who needs no subsidy can get a good deal, like paying only $25 for an office visit with a doctor.

      The abuse of the emergency rooms does have to do with federal laws like you mentioned. This is a big reason why so many Republicans object to Obamacare. If the feds mess up the emergency room treatment, just imagine what it will do for normal care. Several years from now when Obamacare actually kicks in, the waiting times for normal care will look like Canada and the video that Paul shared previously.

      Let me tell you a story about emergency room abuse. I know a poor family who has regularly called the ambulance to use as a taxi service. The man of the house is disabled and in a wheel chair. The wife calls 911 and says her husband has chest pains. The ambulance comes and picks up the wife and husband and brings them to the hospital. He gets checked out, everything is okay, then they leave the hospital and head to the nearby bar to hang out with friends. The real purpose is simply a taxi service. The girlfriend of their son told me that she has seen the wife do something similar on her own, complaining of pain, and then not even check-in with the hospital. She would get out of the ambulance, go into the bathroom, then leave the hospital. The taxpayers pick up the tab for this ambulance service, and it is not cheap. Too bad we don’t have better public transportation to help out. We do have a transportation service funded by the county where a van will pick them up right at their front door, but that normally needs to be scheduled the day before and they don’t want to wait. In some cases they could get a van in a few hours, but they don’t want to wait even that long when the government system allows them to call 911 for free and get their ambulance taxi service within minutes.

      I know somebody in this forum is likely going to accuse me of making this up, but I’m not. I was absolutely shocked that somebody would have the gall to abuse the system this way.

  19. My son is medical director of the Emergency Department at a regional hospital. He is also board certified in Family Medicine. He quit family practice because he spent more time on the phone arguing with some out of state non-physician bean-counter than he did seeing patients. Somebody with an Associate’s degree telling him who he could and could not admit to the hospital, what medications he could prescribe, or whether they could be referred to a specialist.

    He quit family medicine in disgust and went to work at a hospital, where they have whole departments to argue with the bean-counters. Besides, if somebody comes in with an MI or broken leg, they treat them first and figure out whether they have insurance second. He says family practice doctors love the ACA, but specialists tend to hate it. They cannot charge premium rates. He is in favor of single payer for everyone.

    1. Chuck wrote: “He is in favor of single payer for everyone.”

      Not surprising because he is in that business. I would love single payer for everyone to buy computer software too.

      Why not just have a public option? Government bypasses the insurance companies, create their own fund, hire their own medical personnel, and allow people the option to choose to participate in that medical system. Such should result in lower costs and not force anyone to buy what they don’t want.

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