I’ve been living outside of the U.S. for over 15 years now, so Hobby Lobby is a store with which I have no personal experience. I cannot comment on the quality of their goods or the fairness of their prices. But they sure messed up, didn’t they?
Maybe. Sometimes boycotts work, sometimes they work but it takes a long time, and most often they don’t. On the one hand, most people don’t pay any attention at all to the employment policies of the stores where they shop, and a lot of others might have their heart in the right place but suffer from boycott fatigue. If you are concerned about the environment, and health, and worker’s rights, the list of companies you could boycott is virtually endless, and is comprised of about 90% of the places you could conceivably shop, and it doesn’t usually work, so it’s sort of like signing non-stop petitions. There is a third group, who actually approve of what Hobby Lobby is doing.
On the other hand, especially if my facebook page is any indicator, women are seriously pissed off about this one, lots and lots of women. So, maybe this boycott will be effective.
One point that seems to be missing in this debate is that there are two large groups of people who have a direct and compelling reason to want women to have easy and affordable access to contraceptives. The first group, of course, is women. The second group is men.
Seriously, guys. Think of how hard it is to get laid even in an enlightened era, and then imagine if most women didn’t have birth control. Quite simply, they’d stop having sex with us, and then we’d be back in the sexual dark ages, in ‘our parents’ time’ or, in the case of most of you ‘in your grandparents time’
It was a bad era. Women never took their clothes off, there was no rock and roll, and everything was in black and white. What kind of a jerk would want to go back to that?
So, guys, join the Hobby Lobby boycott. Or you may never get laid again.
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