Examining Hobby Lobby's entrails

The sanctimonious owners of Hobby Lobby should have expected they would have every last detail of their behavior examined once they decided someone had appointed them the controllers of the personal behavior of their employers. Bingo!

The results have been what we expect from sanctimonious God-botherers: They don't come close to what they claim.

 First it was revealed that they had been buying contraceptives, like Ella, that they said they abhor. No surprise there. When the Catholic bishops made a similar claim they were caught out, too.

 Now it is revealed that they also invested part (most, actually) of the pension money they control into mutual funds that own, among other things, abortion drug manufacturers. I don't take this as seriously as the earlier discovery that they and the bishops had, in fact, done what the government was now requiring them to do without, it appears, being struck down by an angry Jehovah.

It is not easy being a monomaniac in modern society, whether one wants to be a vegan or a religious bigot. We are too interconnected.

But the Mother Jones report offers a couple of factoids that are worthy of note. One is that the pension fund for 13,000 people, evidently around $100 million, is awfully small. The Greens are not required to have one at all, but that works out to less than $8,000 per worker. Sounds like they are counting, one way or another, on big gummint intrusion into their workers' lives at some point. Second is this:

In their Supreme Court complaint, Hobby Lobby's owners chronicle the many ways in which they avoid entanglements with objectionable companies. Hobby Lobby stores do not sell shot glasses, for example, and the Greens decline requests from beer distributors to back-haul beer on Hobby Lobby trucks.

Recall that the Greens claim their objections are based on their sincere religious beliefs as Roman Catholics. Sorry, as an ex-Catholic I can say confidently that there is no Catholic moral objection to beer or to whatever it is that is served in shot glasses. What this amounts to is a sworn admission by the Greens that they do not manage their company according to any religious doctrine but are merely a pair of busybodies and common scolds.