Here's a word you should know, if not from listening to the Avenue Q soundtrack until your college roommate threatened to throw the CD out of the window: schadenfreude. It's German, and it means being happy when others meet misfortune. It's a perfect way to describe how I felt when I read that Hobby Lobby, the evangelical-owned chain of crafting supply stores, not only won't be able to lay out their "other people buying birth control violates my personal rights" argument before the Supreme Court, for every day they refuse to comply with Obamacare's contraception mandate, they'll be forced to pay $1.3 million in fines. Do you have any idea how much iced out ricrac you could buy with that money?!
The daily fines, which will begin being assessed on January 1st of 2013, cap off a long year of the Oklahoma City-based chain attempting to argue that the owners' personal beliefs should dictate how their employees are allowed to use their benefits. They lost in court in November on the grounds that while people are very serious about scrapbooking, Hobby Lobby is not technically a religious organization and does not qualify for a religious exemption to the contraception mandate. Before Christmas, the Supreme Court refused to grant the chain an emergency injunction against the law, but that hasn't stopped the company's lawyer from asserting that they're not going to comply with the law. Says Hobby Lobby's attorney Kyle Duncan,
"The company will continue to provide health insurance to all qualified employees. To remain true to their faith, it is not their intention, as a company, to pay for abortion-inducing drugs."
Ugh, you rubber cement-huffing nincompoop. Emergency contraception doesn't cause abortions, no matter how many times you repeat it.
Anyway, I'm all for Hobby Lobby (and all other organizations that think birth control is totes gross) ignoring the law. If they keep this up for long enough, we won't have to worry about the fiscal cliff.
And I suppose that now's as good a time as any to confess publicly that "Hobby Lobby" is the nickname I've given my vagina.