A woman walks from a Hobby Lobby Inc., store in Little Rock, Ark., Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2012. The Oklahoma City-based chain filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday over a mandate in the health reform law that requires employers to provide coverage for the morning-after pill.
Associated Press
Our take: Hobby Lobby is the first Chrisitan Evangelical business to sue the federal government over the Affordable Care Act's preventative care mandate. But the lawsuit isn't about religious objection to birth control, per se. It's about being forced to provide the "morning after pill" to its employees.
A petition with 80,000 signatures brought forward by a social activist group demanding that Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. drop its lawsuit opposing the Health and Human Services "preventive services" mandate is misleading and wrong, says a lawyer for the Christian family-owned nationwide business.
According to a press release from "Faithful America" and subsequent news reports, a Christian evangelical pastor identified as the Rev. Lance Schmitz of Capitol Hill Church of the Nazarene in Oklahoma City, attempted to deliver the petition to the Hobby Lobby headquarters in Oklahoma City on Thursday and was kicked off the premises and unable to deliver the petition.
Kyle Duncan, general counsel for the Becket Fund, who is defending Hobby Lobby in the HHS lawsuit, told The Christian Post on Thursday that although he does not know exactly what transpired at the company's headquarters, he has read the petition.
"The petition is misleading. It makes it seem as if Hobby Lobby is seeking to exclude birth control from its health plan all together. That's just not true. The Green family and Hobby Lobby do not have any religious objection to birth control per se. Their plans have covered preventive contraceptives and will continue to do so," Duncan said.
Read more about Hobby Lobby and the lawsuit on The Christian Post .
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Matt writes about faith how it is lived, how it intersects with society and how current trends affect religious practice. He returned to reporting and writing after more than 12 years as an editor, most recently a more ..
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If I worked for a company that required me to share the Company President's religiously-based beliefs about sexuality, and which forced me to conform my life and private practices to those fanatic beliefs, I would quit in the most public way I More..
So it's come to this. We are now petitioning people to give up their freedom of religion. At least this isn't as bad as the Obama Administration, who have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, passing the bill in the first place.