Hobby Lobby accused of hypocrisy amid smuggling case
Hobby Lobby, the arts-and-crafts chain whose Christian owners won a landmark Supreme Court ruling on religious freedom, is caught in an antiquities-smuggling scandal that has opened the company to accusations of hypocrisy.
The Oklahoma City-based business agreed to pay a $3-million U.S. fine Wednesday over its role in what federal prosecutors said was the smuggling into the U.S. of ancient clay tablets, seals and other Iraqi archeological objects that might have been looted from the war-torn country.
Online, many people piled on, with more than one saying things like: “I know Hobby Lobby’s big on the Ten Commandments, but how about Thou shalt not steal?” and “Hypocritical cretins. Preach one thing and practise another.”
Hobby Lobby, whose president, Steve Green, has been collecting ancient artifacts since 2009 and is building an $800 million US Bible museum in Washington, pleaded naiveté in doing business with dealers in the Middle East.
“The company was new to the world of acquiring these items and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process,” Hobby Lobby said in a statement. “This resulted in some regrettable mistakes.”
Federal prosecutors described a scheme that involved lying and perhaps stealing. It included middlemen and involved the use of phoney or misleading invoices, shipping labels and other paperwork to slip the artifacts past U.S. customs agents, prosecutors said.
Among other things, cuneiform tablets were labelled “ceramic tiles,” and items carried paperwork that said they came from Turkey or Israel. Also, artifacts were undervalued and shipped in small batches to multiple addresses in Oklahoma City to avoid drawing the attention of customs agents, prosecutors said.
Bob Murowchick, an associate professor in archaeology and anthropology at Boston University, cast doubt on the firm’s claim it didn’t know what it was doing.
“It’s like that scene in Casablanca: ‘I am shocked, shocked, that there is gambling going on here,’ ” Murowchick said.
Under the settlement, Hobby Lobby must return thousands of artifacts it brought to the U.S. in 2009 and 2010.
Hobby Lobby is a cultural powerhouse in the United States. Green doesn’t open his 600 stores on Sunday so his 28,000 employees may observe the Christian Sabbath.
The company successfully argued before the Supreme Court in 2014 that because of the owners’ religious beliefs, it shouldn’t have to supply birth control to employees under “Obamacare.”
Because of widespread looting of cultural institutions and other sites in Iraq, U.S. law makes it a crime to possess or traffic in Iraqi archaeological treasures if they were illegally removed from the country since 1990, or if there are reasonable grounds to think so. Iraqi law also prohibits the export of the country’s antiquities.