As you have probably heard by now, the hobby store empire whose ultra-super-Christian owners battled fervently to prevent any of their own nationwide employees from getting birth control because Jesus has now been caught willfully smuggling stolen Iraqi artifacts because those owners are complete bastards.
Prosecutors said in the complaint that Hobby Lobby, whose evangelical Christian owners have long maintained an interest in the biblical Middle East, began in 2009 to assemble a collection of cultural artifacts from the Fertile Crescent. The company went so far as to send its president and an antiquities consultant to the United Arab Emirates to inspect a large number of rare cuneiform tablets — traditional clay slabs with wedge-shaped writing that originated in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.
Get it? So Hobby Lobby's owners have been collecting ancient artifacts from the Middle East, probably also because Jesus, and have been using the company as a front to do it. They had been previously warned that the artifacts were likely looted, and went to lengths to both buy the artifacts anyway and hide them from potential investigators.
Hobby Lobby wired payments to seven separate personal bank accounts, the prosecutors said. The first dealer then shipped the items marked as clay or ceramic tiles to three Hobby Lobby sites in Oklahoma. All of the packages had labels falsely identifying their country of origin as Turkey, prosecutors said.
The company has now agreed to return over 5,000 of the imported artifacts and pay a $3 million fine. Nobody will go to jail because America's rich people can break the law all they want.
Really, what cretins these people are. There's no word on which warring group in Iraq may have smuggled out the artifacts to be sold—though a few names come to mind—but that was apparently of no concern to Hobby Lobby when assisting in the smuggling. They'll write checks that may or may not be ending up in the hands of terrorists or their supporters just fine—oh, but don't make them pay for insurance that covers birth control, that's where they’ll draw the moral line.