Not to jump the gun in this new thread, since Dan hasn’t yet delivered this week’s radio episode, but Dan, via Twitter, has solicited my reaction to the news, (breathlessly reported by certain media outlets) that Hobby Lobby’s 401(k) plan offerings include mutual funds that in turn have holdings that include stocks of pharmaceutical companies whose products include drugs and/or devices which Hobby Lobby has objected, on grounds of religious morality, to including within their self-funded health insurance plan.

Dan, on the assumption you were asking about comments specifically as they might relate to the Supreme Court case, the short answer is: utterly irrelevant. Complete red herring. (Ditto, by the way, for the “arguments” about how Hobby Lobby distributes Chinese-manufactured goods, etc.)

To see why, we need only go back again to Thomas v. Review Board. The point Hobby Lobby’s opponents are trying to elicit from this news is that because there is, as they see it, an inconsistency (or as scandal-seekers prefer these days, “hypocrisy”) between this state of affairs and the stance taken by Hobby Lobby in the litigation, that must somehow detract from the validity of the latter. That’s essentially the position the lower court took in the Thomas case, but which the U.S. Supreme Court rightly slammed on review. One of the things that had swayed the Indiana state court in that case, you’ll recall, was the petitioner’s admitted willingness to work in a job producing the rolled steel necessary for tank construction. As the U.S. Supreme Court observed: “The [Indiana state] court found this position inconsistent with Thomas’ stated opposition to participation in the production of armaments. But Thomas’ statements reveal no more than that he found work in the roll foundry sufficiently insulated from producing weapons of war. We see, therefore, that Thomas drew a line, and it is not for us to say that the line he drew was an unreasonable one.”

Similarly, the ballyhooed revelation about Hobby Lobby’s 401(k) plan reveals no more than that the Greens found that including mutual funds in their retirement fund that have holdings that include stocks in pharmaceutical companies that produce, among other things, EC/IUDs – was “sufficiently insulated” from procuring abortions. Substituting Hobby Lobby’s name for that of Thomas here, “We see, therefore, that Hobby Lobby drew a line, and it is not for [a court] to say that the line it drew was an unreasonable one.”

And that’s assuming that the Greens were even specifically aware of this situation, which doesn’t strike me as by any means certain.

It’s fine for Hobby Lobby’s detractors in the media to criticize the Greens’ beliefs and practices as not being (in Chief Justice Burger’s words) “acceptable, logical, consistent or comprehensible”. I think such criticisms have, by and large, not been well reasoned and, among other things, don’t actually point to an internally inconsistent belief system, just a nuanced one. Nonetheless, perhaps those criticisms from armchair theologians and others will succeed in turning some portion of public opinion against Hobby Lobby (and possibly, through guilt by association, against Conestoga Wood as well).

It won’t matter to the Supreme Court case, though, because the Constitution prevents a court from basing a legal outcome on such an analysis.