On Saturday, Mike Huckabee led a Hobby Lobby ‘buycott’ modeled on his campaign to support Chick-fil-A. Huckabee worked with the Family Research Council to promote the event, which coincided with Supreme Court arguments in Hobby Lobby’s suit to avoid the contraception coverage mandate, a case that Huckabee declared last week will determine “whether religious liberty still exists in America.”
“If religious liberty and freedom of conscience doesn’t exist for Hobby Lobby, how long will it be before it’s taken from you?” Huckabee asked on his Fox News program. “Enough of government thinking its God and trying to act like it.”
In that case, Huckabee must think that he himself is God: When he was governor of Arkansas, he signed an even broader contraception coverage mandate into law.
Bill Scher reports that “in 2005, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee signed a law mandating Arkansas insurance plans provide contraception coverage, including church-affiliated organizations such as hospitals and universities.”
Corporations like Hobby Lobby and other secular for-profits were not exempt under the Huckabee-approved law [PDF], which only exempted entities “organized and operated for religious purposes 16 and has received a § 501(c)(3) designation from the Internal Revenue Service.”
As Laura Bassett of the Huffington Post notes, the Affordable Care Act actually goes farther in “carv[ing] out an exemption for religious schools, hospitals and nonprofits in addition to churches.”
Huckabee also falsely claimed that the federal mandate compels “business owners to pay for employees’ abortions”; the forms birth control covered by the mandate are neither abortions or abortifacients.
None of this, of course, is surprising coming from the politician who suggested that birth control is for women who “can’t control their libido.”
