To: Michael Potter, CEO, Eden Foods
Eden Foods: drop out of the birth control lawsuit
Michael Potter, CEO Eden Foods: drop out of the lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act's requirement that birth control be covered as a routine part of the employer-provided healthcare that your employees work hard to earn. Birth control is basic healthcare that everyone who needs it should be able to access.
Why is this important?
When Eden Foods' CEO Michael Potter first joined the federal lawsuit in opposition to the new requirement to provide birth control for female employees in any company health plan, he claimed it was a religious objection. Now, according to a recent interview in Salon [1], he's revealed that he doesn't want to cover it because he's a man.
For private companies to claim that they should be legally treated like churches is bad enough, but to claim that they should be able to discriminate against their employees because the CEO is a different gender? Ridiculous.
And reading through his comments, the more Potter talks, the worse it sounds. From Salon:
“I’ve got more interest in good quality long underwear than I have in birth control pills, … Because I’m a man, number one and it’s really none of my business what women do,” Potter said. So, then, why bother suing? “Because I don’t care if the federal government is telling me to buy my employees Jack Daniel’s or birth control."
Birth control is like long underwear? Like whiskey? No, Mr. Potter, birth control is healthcare. No company's employees should go without routine healthcare that they work hard to earn just because their boss thinks it's silly.
Sign today to tell Mr. Potter and Eden Foods that birth control is an important healthcare service that should be covered by every health insurance plan.
[1] - "Eden foods doubles down in birth control flap" by Irin Carmon, Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/15/eden_foods_ceo_digs_himself_deeper_in_birth_control_outrage/