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Hobby Lobby appears willing to face fines rather than bow to the Obamacare contraceptive mandate.

Hobby Lobby has decided to face millions in fines rather than bow to the Obamacare contraceptive mandate.

They will continue to provide their employees healthcare, but will refuse to include any payments for contraceptives as now required by Obamacare. For standing by their beliefs and doing this, it is very possible this company could end up going bankrupt, thereby putting 13,000 employees out of work. Not only will they lose the healthcare plans that Obama promised they could keep, they won’t even have jobs!

Thank you Obama for giving us Obamacare. And thank you the American voters who have decided to allow this disaster of a law to go forward. Sadly, the worst is yet to come.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


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"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

11 comments

  • John M. Egan

    …& they reelected this Community Organizer-in-charge. Truly, the masses are a_ _ _ _!

  • mike shupp

    :Let the company die and good riddance.

    The USA is not and was never intended to be a theocracy.

    Deal with it.

  • David Hollick

    I’m sure the 13,000 people (real, live humans, with families and obligations) will be comforted in the knowledge that losing their jobs will “teach this evil company a lesson”.

  • Your comment is a wonderful display of leftwing intolerance and ignorance.

    First the intolerance. The owners of a private company wish to follow their personal religious beliefs, and you want to see them destroyed. And you don’t care who gets harmed in the process. How nice. I dread living in the kind of country you would create.

    Now the ignorance. No one is harmed by Hobby Lobby’s refusal to pay for contraceptives. It is a cheap drug, easy to obtain. Their employees are denied nothing by the company’s refusal. Everyone is still free to buy the drug or not, depending on their religious beliefs and personal circumstances. Yet somehow you see this as establishing a theocracy? Do you even have the slightest idea what the word means?

    As I say, I dread the country you would create. Under your definition of tolerance, religious liberty, practiced peaceably by individuals, is impossible. Instead, we will all be required to toe the line of liberal orthodoxy, or be punished.

  • mike shupp

    Well, if they can’t bend a bit to fit in with the rest of society, they can go. By retirement preferably, by bulldozers if they insist — I’m not the one veing choosy here.

    Let’s consider. There are people who don’t like most aspects of modern medicine — Christian Scientists, for example. Jehova’s Witnesses. If they have a bad heart attack, they don’t have surgery; they lie in bed with a Church trained “practioner” to keep them comfortable and wait for the end. No surgery, no pacemaker, no tables full of pills. And WE MAKE THEM PAY TAXES TO SUPPORT HOSPITALS AND DOCTORS ANYHOW. Despite their religious preference.

    Tell me what you have done to fight this iniquity. If you haven’t done anything yet, when will you start?

    Please distinguish between the Chrisitian Scientist case and your hobby shop’s case? Please explain to me why Christian Scientists owning a business should be expected to provide any sort of health care to their employees.

    Again, let’s consider. First case (A): Let’s seperate medical treatment and prescription from individual businesses entirely, so our personal religions are not a factor. Let’s have socialized medicine, in short. A woman’s contraceptives are paid for by taxpayers — rather like a man’s prostate surgery. People are perfectly free to pick their doctors and their hospitals, and rich people and poor can count on the same general quality of care throughout the nation. Isn’t that ideal?

    Second case (B): I think Rick Perry suggested this recently. Sell contraceptive pills over the counter in drug stores, just like toothpaste or aspirin. No age check. No ID inspection. No list of names for the chief pharmacist to consult, just a friendly exchange of currency for a commonly used consumer product. (Okay, now and then women have adverse reactions to oral contraceptives and really do need to see a doctor — but people have bad reactions to aspirin too, as doctors will tell you.) So this is workable, and it really ought to bring down the cost of contraceptives, and it seems to protect women’s privacy in a lot of ways.

    Third case (C): we keep on doing what we’ve been doing, because it lets elderly men scrutinize and punish the sex lives of young women.

    What looks best to you? A, B, or C.

  • wodun

    I stopped reading shortly after said Christians don’t like modern medicine. Do you really think that? You need to re-examine your bigoted stereotype.

    And you are upset that some religious people choose to forego medical treatmnet. Well, under Obamacare it isn’t a choice, many of us will be forced to forego treatment that we would have been afforded under the old system. I happen to disagree with both approaches but one group is exercising free will and the rest of us are just experiencing the liberal theocracy of state worship.

    In my state, insurances companies are dropping coverage for prescribed medications altogether rather than meet all of the regulations and pay all the penalties that come with Obamacare. So “free” abortion pills but no heart medications or antibiotics. F’n great. Thanks Obama voters for making the health insurance industry worse but forcing us to buy their products.

    I wont be blaming insurance companies or doctors but the politicians who created this mess. As the years go by, watch who the politicians blame and how they use the hatred they direct at these groups to seize more power and write more crappy laws.

  • mike shupp

    I said Christian Scientists forego a lot of modern medicine. I wasn’t aware this was a deep dark secret.
    Get your eyes checked — while you still have the freedom to see an optometrist.

  • “Well, if they can’t bend a bit to fit in with the rest of society, they can go. By retirement preferably, by bulldozers if they insist — I’m not the one veing choosy here.”

    Your words. And how should they “go”? You suggest “bulldozers.” Maybe we can round up all these damn religious nuts and put them in camps, eh? Or maybe just force them to live in restricted areas? And if they won’t, what then? Maybe we should put them in prison? Or maybe just gas them to get them out of the way.

    The rest of your essay is meaningless, as you present three choices as if those are the only choices that exist. Choice B at least hints at the idea of freedom, but regardless, your approach is to demand I accept your choices, not my own.

    Like I said, I dread the society you would force onto the rest of us. But you will be proud of yourself for doing it.

  • wodun

    “Please explain to me why Christian Scientists owning a business should be expected to provide any sort of health care to their employees.”

    Indeed, why should anyone be forced to provide health care to employees or for people to buy health insurance on their own? Why should health insurance companies be forced to provide certain services?

    Religious freedom is enshrined in our constitution and issues about forcing companies to pay for abortions or anything else is only an issue because of the over reach of the state. No one is saying that insurance companies cant sell such policies, many already do. People are saying the government has no right to force people to buy them.

    Government involvement in the health care industry is making things worse. Everything from the patient/doctor interactions to being able to enter into a contract for health insurance services is getting worse.

  • Pzatchok

    This could have all been avoided if Obama care just forced everyone to self insure instead of involving their employers.

    They could have created insurance exchanges to provide negotiating leverage like large companies have and at the same time they could have provided different types of insurance to accommodate those who do not want to pay for specific programs in the coverage. Like birth control.

    But no. One of the points of Obama care is to make abortions and birth control free but to not pay for it out of the government tax system. In fact it was written to force full healthcare on the people but to not have to include it in the governments tax books. A hidden tax.
    Now they will start claiming it hasn’t added anything to the budget.(But you will be poorer because of it).

    If, like I have said many time in the past, they had just expanded medicare/medicaid to cover those who needed it then all these arguments would have never happened. They could have just doubled the per paycheck tax for medicaid/medicare and no one would have been able to stop them.
    But no, they forced these arguments with a specific purpose in mind. To destroy the 47% of this country that is conservative/right.

    I find it funny how the left will praise the religions and beliefs of aboriginal tribes but find the religions of the western world dangerous and scary.
    Scary to the point that they think they need destroyed by their hand. Pretty much the very same thing the Catholic church did 4 hundred years ago in South America.
    I guess we on the right have learned our lessons but they need to go through and learn theirs now.
    Maybe we need to teach real history in schools instead of their abbreviated form of it filled with progressive theory.

    mike shupp seems to be a prime example of our new education system.

  • Obamacare is just another progressive strategy to have a centralized plan, from Washington DC, to take away our liberties to make our own decisions. Obamacare is just making medicine a barracks style service. Medical care will necessarily decline in quality in order to provide more medical care for more people who cannot afford it. Obamacare does nothing to lower costs and improve efficiency. Only competitive market forces and people’s free choice can achieve what the government cannot.

    And now, the progressives are going after the 2nd Amendment. These people are ruthless in their application of their politics. They want to fundamentally transform our country into a false Ameritopia, which can never be achieved. What’s most objectionable is they are ramming through their agenda and the opposition party has left the proverbial field of battle.

    Anytime the government tells us citizens what we have to do, our liberties take a blow.

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