I stayed away from the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court Kerfuffle purposefully, mostly because, and I can not stress this enough, there’s really nothing there. In the broader context in which every American citizen attempted to explain the pending and then rendered decision using some sweeping philosophical or Constitutional template, most missed the fact that it was simply a case in which lawyers of both sides argued about how to reconcile two previously enacted laws passed by Congress and signed by Presidents which conflicted with each other. Specifically, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, enacted in 1993 and the Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2009. Neither law found itself struck down or even hindered in any way, merely forced to coexist with one another.
Some how, that very boring and mundane process was blown out of any proportion that could be possibly construed as sane, and into the ill informed’s proxy for the First Amendment. Granted, most if not all of the hysteria has come from the tyrannical tolerati found within the rank and file of the political left. Some of the more egregiously false remarks I’ve heard have included cries of, “They’re taking our reproductive rights away from us.” “They’re allowed to refuse us contraceptive care now,” or, “they’re waging a war on women and trying to make birth control and abortion illegal.”
None of this is true of course, but it will help the left raise gobs and gobs of cash off of the whole thing, and that’s what’s really important here. A quick test to prove that last point might be in order. Justices Kennedy and Alito both included within their opinions, step by step instructions for HHS on how to get the offending 4 types of pills covered for those on the Hobby Lobby health plan, without violating either RFRA of the ACA. If in 90 days time we’re still talking about this, then we’ll know whether this was outrage or fauxrage.
So what was that analysis from that respected magazine bird cage liner of impeccable integrity, Mother Jones? I’m glad you’ve asked, here it is. Apparently, one of the geniuses at Mother Jones did some research, probably on Freeerisa.benefitspro.com, and found the 5500 paper work for Hobby Lobby, which is a matter of public record. It’s hardly the stuff anyone outside of the securities industry is usually interested in, but it does include the various mutual funds found in ERISA compliant retirement plans.
This according to Mother Jones’ Molly Redden:
Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012 (see above)—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).
There are over 40,000 mutual funds offered on various exchanges in the United States. Of those 40,000, anyone in the biz so to speak, might have a trading platform that includes up to as much as 5,000 at any one time. Some firms will allow multiple trading platforms to be used on a temporary basis, but this gets really expensive, and eventually all will settle on one platform. Ask anyone to name all of the options on their platform, and I’d be willing to bet a good bit that they couldn’t do it. Add to that, that within each mutual fund, just by the nature of how that investment vehicle works, there could be up to a few hundred different securities owned. It would be difficult, even for someone with knowledge of how to research it, to actually tell you what all of the individual securities that you owned actually were, at least without spending a great deal of effort in a process that fruitless. (Most research firm reports will list off the top holdings of any particular fund, somewhere between 5 and 20, but digging to find the entirety of a fund’s holdings can prove a lot more difficult.)
Let’s pretend for a moment that you owned 100 shares of Columbia’s Marsico 21st Century focused growth fund, A shares. Could you right now tell me how many shares and of what companies would fill out your portfolio? What about RiverSource’s Diversified Equity Income Fund. What stocks make up that portfolio, and how would each share of that fund translate into your individual ownership stake of the underlying companies? Holding the Hobby Lobby ownership, on the face of this argument is silly at best, but it does manage to get worse.
Hobby Lobby doesn’t control what’s in its 401k platform. Hobby Lobby, while they may have the ultimate decision on things, most probably leaves much of the decision making process up to the third party administrative team, (the registered representative who sold them the package,) and only ever sees the names of the mutual funds, and only if they’re truly micro managing the process. Hobby Lobby has no say in how those funds are invested, and only has control in that they can nix one fund in favor of another, and that even fails to consider that a fund can make trades after Hobby Lobby’s purchase.
More to the point, Molly Redden herself probably owns a fraction of a share in some company that produces cigarettes, beer, guns, Bush for President signs, what have you. This kind of a microscope and analysis can only be described as dishonesty put on steroids. When I see a source quoted as Mother Jones, that’s usually an indication to simply reject it out of hand, but for some reason I kept going in this case. They did not disappoint.
Here’s the headline attached to this bit of non evidence:
Hobby Lobby Invested In Numerous Abortion And Contraception Products While Claiming Religious Objection
Just on a side note, once per year, on my birthday, I fire a client. It is the client who has caused me the most grief during the previous year. Those people who’ve come to my office and stated that their wish was to only invest in, “Socially Responsible Companies,” received an immediate and courteous request to seek out a different professional. If they inquired as to why, I’d simply tell them that I was only interested in working with people who were as committed to successful investing as I would be on their behalf. I have learned that while someone may profess to be willing to take a hit in performance due to limiting their options, such promises usually disappear with the first statement or two. I’ve had similar discussions with people who’ve wanted to play the losing green technology game.
So, for Hobby Lobby’s effort to do something nice, and by the way massively helpful for the working employees that make up their rank and file, they get to play this gotcha game with some lazy turd who knows not one thing about the workings of a retirement plan, but feels compelled to use one as a reason to condemn Hobby Lobby anyhow. The Supreme Court, nor Hobby Lobby seeks to keep these women, who by the way have not themselves complained, from seeking contraceptive coverage. Hobby Lobby covers 16 varying forms of contraception, more than almost any company did prior to Obamacare. No one said that those women would be prevented from paying out of pocket, if those choices were deemed to be something they didn’t want. There is a vehicle available to have those four pills included in the plan without Hobby Lobby’s involvement in the process. Those women are perfectly within their rights as citizens to push for a repeal of the 1993 RFRA Law that until last week, Bill Clinton touted as one of his signature achievements.
Keep in mind, this all comes from the crowd that has made incandescent light bulbs illegal, restricted what kind of toilets we can purchase, restricted the washing machines we can purchase, what kind of foods we are allowed to eat, and what terms are allowed to be utilized in purchasing or selling real estate. All endeavors in which they have intruded themselves into a transaction that they were being asked for zero help in financing. With that in mind, Hobby Lobby not wanting to foot the bill for Abortive pills is somehow considered to be impinging upon the choices of another. This truly is a bizarre world. Rod Serling must be around here somewhere.
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