Hobby Lobby Protests Are Getting Really Creative

When the Supreme Court ruled last week that Hobby Lobby and other closely held corporations didn’t have to cover birth control in health insurance plans for their employees, it set off a wave of outrage. People began organizing, speaking out, tweeting about it. And one woman got creative.

Jasmine Shea decided to do a little subversive protesting by visiting her local Hobby Lobby and rearranging the displays of craft materials to have pro-choice messages. She posted photos of herself on Instagram, displaying her craftsmanship. “Pro Choice” popped up all over the store in big, bold letters.

“My original idea was to pass out condoms to female employees, but when I realized only one was working, my friend and I went around and rearranged all the letters in places to spell out pro-choice,” Shea told the Daily Dot.  She, admittedly, isn’t the first person get crafty at the chain store. ThinkProgress’ Nathaniel Peck did this work of art in a Maryland branch last week, according to Jezebel.

Though these demonstrations are adorkably whimsical, there’s more to it than that.

“I think the ruling opens up a Pandora’s box of religious issues,” Shea said. “All women deserve the right to contraception. . . Women deserve equal pay and equal rights. The reason why I did the prank was to make people laugh and to prove a point that what Hobby Lobby did was kind of ridiculous.”

To be fair, not everyone sees the humor in this kind of protest, which seems to be catching on.

“This is not ‘activism,’” feminist blogger Melissa McEwan wrote. “This is just piling more harm on the people who are being directly harmed by this bulls**t ruling. It isn’t the owners of Hobby Lobby who have to clean up the mess left ‘for them.’ It’s the workers in their stores, and causing them headaches isn’t sending a message to management, and it sure as s**t isn’t acting as an ‘ally’ to those workers.”

For her part, Shea says she did her best to minimize the clean-up effort.

“We did put the letters not used neatly together on another hook or cubby so it wasn’t a huge mess for the workers to clean up,” she said.

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