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  • 2012-09-29 (xsd:date)
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  • Is Hobby Lobby Closing All Their Stores? (en)
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  • In a 12 September 2012 USA Today op-ed piece, David Green, the CEO and founder of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts-and-crafts stores, expressing his family's opposition on religious grounds to a new government health mandate that required employers to provide insurance coverage to their employees for contraceptives: Hobby Lobby filed a federal lawsuit challenging that mandate because it included such contraceptives as the morning-after pill and IUDs, which the plaintiffs considered to be forms of abortion: The text of that piece was widely referenced online under misleading headlines such as Hobby Lobby May Close All 500+ Stores in 41 States, based on the notion that David Green would shutter the entire chain rather than comply with the federal mandate, even though he neither announced nor threatened such a course of action (although he did vaguely suggest that the company might not be able to afford the potential financial penalties for refusing to comply with the mandate). The lawsuit finally played its way out in court in June 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled that closely held, for-profit companies (such as Hobby Lobby) could claim a religious exemption to the Affordable Care Act requirement that they provide health insurance coverage for contraceptives: Similar Hobby Lobby closure rumors circulated in mid-2017, after the chain was fined $3 million byFederal prosecutors over claims that the company had bought artifacts smuggled from Iraq that were deliberately mislabelled. (en)
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