A reverend in Illinois organized a demonstration to hand out condoms outside of a local Hobby Lobby store in order to protest the Supreme Court’s ruling on contraception, the Daily Herald reported.
Rev. Mark Winters of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Naperville, Ill., said it started out as a joke in a Facebook, but after he got a great response, he decided to organize a protest.
The group of demonstrators stood outside the store to hand out condoms donated by Planned Parenthood.
Winters told the Daily Herald that he wanted the protest to show that not all Christians oppose birth control. He also said he hoped to get people to question whether the Supreme Court’s decision was fair to Hobby Lobby employees’ religious freedom.
“You can make the religious freedom argument, you can make the argument about contraception, but ultimately, for me, this is about power,” he said. “Jesus had a lot of issue with powerful people using power over the powerless.”
Rev. Emmy Lou Belcher, a retired minister of the DuPage Unitarian Universalist Church in Naperville, told the Daily Herald that she decided to join the demonstration because she believes the ruling leads to exclusion.
“The health care law is meant to cover a diverse society, ” she said, “so people aren’t excluded. What this has done is exclude.”
[H/t Think Progress]
