To: David Green, Hobby Lobby Founder and CEO
Defend Religious Freedom for Individuals, Not Corporations
Your flawed understanding of Americans rights to religious liberty have led you to confuse your right to live according to your religious beliefs with an imagined right to impose your beliefs on those who may or may not share them simply because you sign their paychecks. You need to drop your lawsuit against the federal mandate to provide no-cost birth control as a part of your employees health insurance. Your employees will exercise their religious freedom when they choose for themselves what manner of birth control, if any, to use. You can do the same for yourself. THAT is religious freedom.
Why is this important?
Does religious freedom mean that individuals are free to follow their own consciences, faith or morals in their conduct of their lives? Or does it mean that individuals who sign the paychecks and provide health insurance benefits as part of compensation for work performed get to impose their religious beliefs on their employees as a condition of employment? This seems a very flawed understanding of religious freedom to me. I oppose the efforts of evangelical christians or others who seek to impose their religious beliefs on those who don't share them and call it religious freedom. Such actions are the opposite of religious freedom. So when Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday challenging the federal mandate that they provide their employees no-cost access to contraception that conflicts with their religious beliefs, I consider it an attack on the religious freedom of their employees, not a defense of the religious freedom of the company's owners. I decline to patronize such a business. When they drop their lawsuit and learn to mind their own business and stay out of the bedrooms of their employees, they will get my business back.