Hobby Lobby - "If You Don't Like Working There, Get Another Job"

A Facebook friend recently wrote:

If you dont like your bosses beliefs and what they provide, a person is more than welcome to work anywhere else they want instead of being provided with things. It is not the governments job to run a business especially a small business and now the Supreme Court has ruled just exactly that. Especially a tightly held corporation. You may choose any employer you wish or even be unemployed and let the govt choose what you do and do not get for choices.

My reply follows:

First of all, millions of workers around the nation are just glad to have a job, and cannot bounce around as someone with your skill-level and ability can do. I know of so many workers here in LA who swallow daily doses of humiliation and poor working conditions - they cannot afford to quit and find another job; their skills are limited compared to your skills. They live from paycheck to paycheck and have few if any family resources. Mark, because of all kinds of factors, you have the ability to quit a job and would likely find another quickly; but such is not the case for millions.

Second, it's not about jobs, or finding another one, but protecting the American Worker from PREDATION - whether it be sexual or religious, and this is nothing less than religious predation. We now have the 51st State, Hobby Lobby - doing as it pleases with its citizens - this isn't democracy, this is cruelty.

Nor is this about Christianity in general, but Christianity in particular - a very narrow kind of fundamentalist Christianity that differs in name only from Sharia Law in conservative Muslim nations. Hobby Lobby hates birth control, and would deny health care rights to every woman in America. Is this the kind of land in which I'd like to live? Where women are treated as baby factories, and if they wish birth control, are accused of being irresponsible or a push-over for pleasure? No thank you Mark. And I don't think you would either.

We have rights in this nation that transcend state boundaries, and rights that transcend the property line of our employer's place of business. SCOTUS has now declared a 51st State, essentially, and given it exemptions that a lot of Southern States would love to have - all for religious reasons, of course.

This is insanity Mark, the Nullification idea at work, the dream child of the South, the balkanization of the American Corporation - "closely held" companies doing as they please, thumbing their nose at the Constitution and mistreating their workers by denying them their basic freedoms from religious coercion and the right to choose health care.

Sadly, SCOTUS has revived a 16th Century practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_regio,_eius_religio - "whose realm, his religion."

On so many counts, Mark, it's wrong - terribly wrong! My heart breaks for the folks who work there, and I grieve for the likes of the owners, too, who are locked into a prison house of irrational beliefs and monied power, thinking they're closer to god than the rest of us, and thinking the rest of us quite wrong. What a hard world to live in for them - but with their millions, they fly away to peace and plenty whenever they want, and thank Jesus for all of it. They remind me of the Rich Fool who loved his barns more than the people who filled them with grain. He thought he was godly, but he was only a fool.