ROS at Victory Girls argues that Hobby Lobby, far from being principled martyrs against the onslaught of a tyrannical government that has determined that religious freedom doesn’t apply to individuals, is instead a den of capitalist hypocrites who need be exposed for their posturing perfidy:
Oh, sweet, sweet Hobby Lobby, holder of my heart AND my wallet…………….drop the hypocritical outrage.
[…]
[…] when I peruse the gilt aisles of cupcake wrappers and floral ribbon, heed the call of the ink on Stationery Row, submit to the siren’s call of the windchimes, I notice but one thing now that Hobbity Lobbity has decided to bellow their outrage at The Man:
THIS SHIT’S MADE IN CHINA!
Yeah, THAT China, the commie pinko land of the forced abortions (13 million abortions in China last year, peeps), where 500 women commit suicide daily, the enrollment of girls in school is ranked 107th worldwide, wages of women is 25% lower than those of men, where religion and speech are governmentally controlled, Han are treated as less-then-equal (to state it mildly), and the list goes on.
But let’s focus on the abortions in China, since that directly correlates to Hobbity Lobbity’s perceived violation of their Christian principles.
An estimated 13,000,000 annually, more than half of which are forced as a result of prenatal sex selection due to the mportance placed on male babies. Mandatory periodic pregnancy tests. Mandatory vaginal palpation of rural women’s vaginas to make sure they hadn’t recently given birth. Government-forced sterilization for violation of the One-Child Policy. Mandatory IUD insertion after the first child, with mandatory sterilization if a second is born. Teachers lose retirement benefits for birth quota violatons. Again, the list goes on.
Oddly, that doesn’t prevent Hobby Lobby from obtaining their merchandise from such a country. Awkward…..
So, if you, Hobby Lobby, want to piss and moan that the government is acting out of bounds constitutionally in requiring that you provide certain insurance or be fined, fine. I can and do agree with that. Please, don’t act like your “principles” and “religion” are being violated, however.
To that I say, Cut the shit, hypocrites. It’s about your wallet, not principle.
This is precisely the kind of argument that I suspect will resonate with those predisposed to shudder at public piety, largely as it’s represented by social conservatives. To which my answer is this: I’ll stand with the company that stands up to OUR government. Hobby Lobby has no control over the Chinese government, and the fact that w/o Chinese-made products they couldn’t compete in the marketplace is a reality of today’s retail business. And I don’t look at each Chinese-built DVD player as emblematic of gulags or abortions. I look at those as emblems of global trade.
Hell, China buys up our debt. Are we as Constitutional conservatives hypocrites for demanding our natural rights simply by dint of living in a country being right now buoyed economically by a police state?
We’re left with this: in order to be pure of any taint — like a willingness to trade with countries whose absence of religious conviction, or differences in religious belief from those of evangelicals, leads them to behave in certain ways — they must surrender their business entirely.
Which is a form of economic suicide. Suicide being a sin.
But all cheekiness aside, this argument raises an important issue: since when is it just as bad, belief-wise, to refuse to contribute to the active assault on your faith by your own government — which is forcing you to contribute to the abortion industry — as it is to do nothing at all with respect to other governments?
That is to say, is a desire to save some unborn children in keeping with the precepts of your faith, and relying on a Constitutional protection that you are guaranteed, really the kind of hypocrisy that should either bother us or cause us to cast aspersions at those who are taking a principled stand for religious freedom here, where they have the ability and resources to do so?
Or to put it another way, is Hobby Lobby’s good really the enemy of the perfect?
Because if this truly were all about profit and not principle, losing $1.3 million a day in fines suggests to me that Hobby Lobby is doing the whole profit thing wrong.
Discuss.
Feh, we are held to standards they do not hold themselves to. Typical Alinsky tactic.
Curiously, I was researching the Chinese one-child law recently. For the most part it only applies to urban areas. Rural are allowed more than one child. Its due for phase-out over the next few years too.
“Discuss.” I would, but shut up, they said.
Not that it matters. SHTF, I’ve got your six, but there are people in rank that will shoot you for a quarter. Just sayin’.
Never hurts to remind people which direction is down range, though.
– So then we should just stfu and let the Pussygressives and their little king do what they’re doing because China did it first.
– They’re just not making strawmen the way they used to these days.
Why is Atilla presumed to be on the so-called right again? If this ROS thinks he was some sort of moron, she (he?) may yet have chosen well.
if there were a hobby lobby near here I might would take them some pictures to frame but I don’t think there is so I’m a just go to a mom n pop I think
but hobby lobby is where I get flowers to put on my parents grave when I go to texas you can’t use real flowers cause the deers will eat them up
i’ll shop at Hobby Lobby regardless of whether or not they are lifeydoodles is the point cause I just don’t care but last time I went to Jesus chicken this little hoochie told me to “have a blessed day” and I was like ok that’s enough of that and I haven’t been back
The attraction of cheap grace lies in the fact that it exacts no sacrifice from its recipients. Unfortunately, without sacrifice there can be no sanctification. Thus, those recipients are left nothing save sanctimony with which to demonstrate their state of grace. And that’s what we see here. As we so often do.
On the left they believe in taking anything they can get, good, perfect or otherwise and then go for more. Case in point, New York.
Tyranny starts on little cat feet, but later, once the opposition is cowed, will in triumph ride in on a tank.
Assault weapons are a real problem on the streets of New York.
I wonder, when was the last time someone was killed by an assault weapon?
One not wielded by an officer of the law, that is.
What sad is that she’s damned by her own hand. If Hobby Lobby is greedy and crass for buying goods from China, and ROS has admitted that she’s given her heart and her wallet to Hobby Lobby, then logic dictates that ROS is herself an enthusiastic supporter of Chinese abortion policies.
Why should any of us care what some baby-killer thinks about Hobby Lobby?
That’s why I can’t figure out if ROS’s critique, such as it is, is coming from the right or the left Squid.
What I do know is that the end point of that type of reasoning is obiesance before Leviathan.
It’s coming from nowhere coherent, Ernst. It’s all emotion and cheap grace out of that one.
Geoff, I went to Walmart today and strolled back to the guns and ammo section to ask about the availability of ammunition of the defensive type for my handgun. They were out of stock, but have no plans to stop selling either guns or ammo. They had huge amounts of shells of many calibers and lots of shotguns of different sizes. They also carry ammo for AR-15s but didn’t have any in stock.
Anyway, just FYI.
I figure a solid half of the population of China would like to bear arms, vote in elections, grow what they want and short their government, just like we do!
France’s, Germany’s and China’s residents of rural areas and smaller towns, just to take one constituency shared among three nations, are sick of being railroaded by property taxes, international unions, population-controls and controls on their migration as much as we Americans are tired of DC’s attempts to control us.
Which is why I liked Sarah Palin so much. She threatened to take America’s fight directly to our foreign enemies’ capitals. Who here remembers how, just after losing the election to O/B, Sarah addressed an audience in Tai Pei? There, she signaled American commitment to free-trade, protection for Taiwan from Beijing’s commies, and reassured the region that America’d be stalwart in defense of the shipping lanes we all require to maintain prosperity around the Pacific Ocean. This is the kind of “in-their-face” style we need right now.
Same goes for France, Germany, and even Russia now. Maybe if we Contitutionalists bothered to take a paring knife to our sister-nation’s’ electorates, instead of wasting our powder on our lock-jawed impasse of one we’re stuck with here, we’d make more progress gaining our agendas back here at home.
Internationalizing America’s disputes has worked well for the Democrats. Maybe we should give it a try, too!
Unless Hobby Lobby only works with Chinese manufacturers that pay their workers in abortions, I’m not sure this makes quite the point she thinks she’s making. Giving those workers legitimate work is one of the only ways you can help them fight back against their government.
But I suppose if you define doing business in a country as an explicit endorsement of every action chosen by both every individual and the government, then Hobby Lobby will burn in hell for not confining all their stores to the Moon.
Good grief, but that women is thick. Bookmark that thread as an object lesson that you can’t reason with an unreasonable partner. She’s kryptonite to logic. Like O-Dub, minus the orange powder and 200 lbs.
This ROS woman is black hole stupid. Kudos to you guys for trying.
Oops! Sarah took her speech to Hong Kong, where among other things she bashed the Fed’s bubble-addiction.
Folks in China hates dem some real estate bubbles, too. Sarah was fishing for the small-mouth bass she knew swam un-molested in a neighbor’s pond!
It’s time to take our folksy freedom agenda on a world-tour, and see who bites. A foxy, Alaska-snowbilly with a mother’s warm lap would make a great spokeswoman.
Wanna bet a majority of the worlds’ citizens will like what they see?
All I see in America is a bunch of Julias (some with X-chromosomes) wanting free stuff, but outside our borders is a billion people longing for the freedoms that the Julias have already traded away.
If we cannot reach our Julias in the USA, then we ought to go over Julias’ heads and try to leverage the desires of free-yearning folks overseas to effect change here. Just like the Dem’s hoped to do with Fast and Furious…but more subtle.
Let’s well and truly misbehave!
Excellent point. Should have included it myself in my reply.
Incidentally, I’m told that this is the writer’s second ever blog post.
Welcome to the blogosphere, ROS. We don’t play beanbag.
Hobby Lobby should just have its kitsch made here in the US. I’m sure people would be willing to pay $25 at Hobby Lobby for a specialty brush to paint their model train depot or their pewter redcoats that they may otherwise purchase at Target for $1.75.
The argument resists the fact that to compete in the market they are in — which is already a specialty market — they have to remain at least remotely competitive with large retailers. That necessitates certain business decisions. Having things manufactured in China so that you can maintain your business is not a de facto admission of support for the governmental policies of China.
have a blessed day ROS person keep swinging for the fences
Thank you Leigh, good to have an account from an internet person I feel is trustworthy.
“a de facto admission of support for the governmental policies of China.”
It evidently is for Jane. I wonder what she personally has done to better the lives of those poor, downtrodden peasents in China.
More clearly, how would she institute the changes in GOVERNANCE in a foreign country that would suit her best interests.
Even though every country in the west, including ours, went through its own period of sweat shops and child labor and the like on our way to first-world producer status, G-d forbid that we buy the products from any other country that is trying to get to where we are.
No society can jump right from the farm to the condo. There are steps they need to take along the way.
Wallyworld update N. Texas:
My two local are out of just about everything.
Clerks at both say they are getting more.
Cabelas (2) and Cheaper Than Dirt (2) in the area are low. They are getting more.
Nobody was expecting a run of this magnitude.
Everybody’s out of even .22LR. Who woulda thunk it?
Lenin and Stalin and Mao all say your wrong.
Utopia is right around the next corner, or the corner after that, or just past the slight rise up ahead.
You just have to be willing to break enough eggs is all.
You’re welcome, geoff.
“Lenin and Stalin and Mao all say your wrong.” So does Pol Pot and he should know he has thousands of hectares of bleaching bones to prove it.
This sort of “perfect as the enemy of the good” thinking is a traveling companion to other magical thinking, especially with respect to guns.
I saw it yesterday when engaging in a futile Twitter exercise of pointing out the problems with the overwrought calls for gun bans in the wake of Sandy Hook. I pointed out that the difference between an outcome like the Clackamas Mall shooting and Sandy Hook is often the mere presence of an armed response (“a good guy with a gun”), and is more likely to end in 2 people shot than in 26.
Didn’t matter to the respondent. Their counters included that there was no such thing as a good guy with a gun (only a potential murderer), and that I was saying that 2 people dying was a good thing. Their solution? Ban all guns, of course. No exceptions.
It’s binary, magical thinking. There’s no such thing as “better”. There’s no spectrum. It’s either grant them their magical wish fulfillment, or you’re an advocate for child-killing.
And their vote counts just as much as yours does.
I no longer wonder why I’m having trouble sleeping at night.
Just wait until the children’s chorus singing, “All we are saying, is give magical thinking a chaaance!” during the Obama announcement, VekTor. And good on you for trying.
Hmm…., if Hobby Lobby should see the light and stop trying to procure cheap goods from China for whatever reason ROS deems relevant, and further should they get an ROS stamp of approval for all their other vendors, would Hobby Lobby be within their rights to ask customers if they support abortion before being willing to sell to them?
Perhaps we’re taking this whole being without sin thing a little too far.
And don’t forget that they have to ask their employees if they’re going to use their money for an abortion. If they are, then they’re allowed to deduct that amount from the paycheck.
Or, you know, freedom for all. But screw that!
The US did somewhere around 750K abortions last year, with a population of ~350 million. China has a population in excess of a billion souls. With the Progressives main goal in life to avoid any and all reponsibility, what do you suppose our abortion rate would be with 1 billion plus people?
– Yet another Libturd comparison that holds no water.
President Obama’s Sandy Hook speech turned into a pro-life video
If China or Iran or wealthy London’ers want to poke Americans with political “news” day in and day out, there’s nothing to stop them. They just buy some time on one of the Dem’s media channels, enjoy the creative industry spooge they bought, while the media companies donate back to the Democrats.
If one of us tried to do that in Shanghai Press, or Egyptian media, we’d be hamstrung, censored or strung-up.
The result is America gets pummeled by a uni-directional dog-pile everyday of Gun Control, America’s Fat, or Whatever. But American citizens can’t fire back. What gives?
ROS at Victory Girls does make a very good point. Along the lines of “if this then that” syllogism.
The logical conclusion then is to shutter all Hobby Lobby stores. But that conclusion is allowed only if you haven’t dropped the whole thing at “Hobbity Lobbity” as a bit of irresistible bathos so common to 7th grade girls, just that clever, and never missing from this sort of rebuttal. Which belies contempt, so at contempt the whole issue is dropped. Usually.
And always numbers are suspect. Every number stated is questioned. So if you can see past that cloud of bullshit, and the assumption that everybody should just go along and cheerfully fund abortions and if you feel like accepting their vocabulary (China has butt-fucking nothing to do with this issue after all) then proceed to pay the little dips hit attention but only as a toy.
Nobody believed liberals and progressives when they assured government money would not fund abortions. Nobody. And here we are. Certainly, Hobby Lobby is hypocritical if they do not shutter their business, but not because they’re forced to buy goods from China that dumb ass. The only option is to refuse to operate a business.
So take your hobbies and your lobbies and go fuck yourself with them.
The answer is don’t play.
anecdote alert:
I moved downtown so that I can be surrounded by people and life. Oddly, I realize now, I sleep with the door open to allow the downtown sounds in. My apartment building is situated so that everybody’s balcony faces each other as the inside of a horseshoe so the architecture creates a sound resonance. Apparently women gathered at one apartment, only womens’ voices, I heard waves of screams late one night. The waves turned out to match the election results running on the television and I will never forget that sound. It was a truly horrifying sound, the sort you’d expect Sasquatch makes but worse than that, like ecstasy and orgasm and something else really really uninhibited and scary. Those women scared the living shit out of me. And they still do. I can never forget that sound.
That’s what Hobby Lobby is standing against if they decide to stand. If I were them, I would fold. Take my money and run. I imagine even lesbians have hobbies but I wouldn’t be supplying them. Not if keeping them happy takes that. There’s your argument for you, dumbass.
Heh. I’ve been reading that thread of ROS’s. You guys are going to have her calling you big meany heads! pretty quick.
I think she likes Gulermo. ; )
I think everyone more or less gave up trying to reason her out of whatever stereotyped view that she’s operating from of how an evangelical Christian family owned business goes about reconciling their principles with how they conduct business; against which Hobby Lobby stands prejudged, because they’re not doing whatever it is she thinks they should think about whatever it is they should do, if they really believed the way she thinks they believe.
Or maybe I’m wrong, and she speaks from extensive experience and depth of understanding about what it is the folks who own Hobby Lobby really believe.
She’s certainly defensive for someone who is so convinced she is right. Maybe she can read minds, since she argues like a liberal.
“What you’re saying is (insert completely wrong take on what you just said) . . .”
That shit drives me crazy. I’ve been arguing with a disingenuous liberal on a different board and she is doing the same bullshit.
She’s certainly defensive
Well. invincible ignorance is the best defense.
I learned something interesting today. If I can get a third party to say in large capital letters that “OF COURSE SHE IS.”, (or he, as is my case), I become…wait for it…TA DA a conservative! Way cool, huh?
hobby lobby has a whole lot more credibility in these matters than the churchy litigants I think cause I bet they opposed obamacare from the get go, and that makes them ok in my book
plus they have craft stuff
if hobby lobby would justy stress their model tanks german ss stuff
and maybe a tom jones whats new p;uasycat hand bands i would buy th m
im not gay
morrisseY
I missed the ALLCAPS! Did she use excessive punctuation,too? Some people think that makes their point clearer, Lord knows why.
You certainly got under her skin, Gulermo. Good on you.