High court to address HHS mandate on abortifacient drugs

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, a landmark case addressing the rights of business owners to operate their family companies without violating their religious convictions. 

The nation’s highest court accepted the federal government’s appeal of a June decision by the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals that a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate to provide potentially life-terminating contraceptive drugs and devices in employee insurance plans places a substantial burden on the religious freedoms of Hobby Lobby and sister company Mardel Christian & Education stores, which are solely owned by founder David Green and his family.

“This is a major step for the Greens and their family businesses in an important fight for Americans’ religious liberty,” said Kyle Duncan, general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and lead lawyer for Hobby Lobby. “We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will clarify once and for all that religious freedom in our country should be protected for family business owners like the Greens.” 

In July, a lower federal court granted Hobby Lobby a preliminary injunction preventing the government from enforcing the HHS mandate requiring family businesses to provide in the employee health insurance plan two drugs and two devices that are abortifacient.

The Greens and their family businesses—who have no moral objection to providing 16 of the 20 FDA-approved contraceptives required under the mandate—then took the unusual step in October of joining the government in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case, despite the family’s Tenth Circuit victory.

“My family and I are encouraged that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide our case,” said Green, Hobby Lobby’s founder and CEO. “This legal challenge has always remained about one thing and one thing only: the right of our family businesses to live out our sincere and deeply held religious convictions as guaranteed by the law and the Constitution. Business owners should not have to choose between violating their faith and violating the law.”

The case will be argued and decided before the end of the Supreme Court’s term in June.

Nonfiction publishers in CBA market opt to either embrace or eschew widely adopted educational program

New Common Core educational standards became a source of controversy even before being adopted for use by 45 U.S. states. Some Christian publishers are applying the standards to their products while others are running in the other direction.

“Common Core has become a lightning rod, layered with issues and emotions that don’t relate directly to the academic achievement of students,” said Mary Manz Simon, author and children’s market consultant. “As an early childhood educator, I work with content at the lower primary levels. Based on my experience, Common Core is providing a desperately needed scaffolding of learning skills for these early grades. The degree of content mastery is more rigorous and demanding than what we have known.

“The standards emphasize higher levels of critical thinking, which include analysis, synthesis and evaluation,” Simon added. “I believe some of the negativism toward Common Core comes when those aspects of interpretive thinking, especially by students in upper grades, are applied to biblical learning.

“At all levels, however, the assessment piece of the initiative subjects students to more testing, which is a concern in our current ‘test culture.’ ” 

Common Core requires new and revised materials—and that’s where Christian publishers enter today’s classroom.

“Tommy Nelson has reviewed much of our backlist and applied the Common Core standards,” said Laura Minchew, senior vice president and publisher, specialty publishing, for HarperCollins Christian. “We also run our new titles through Common Core guidelines.”

“We are not specifically creating products for the educational market,” Minchew clarified. “However, we will have a landing page with all of the Tommy Nelson titles and the associated Common Core standards.”

Senior Vice President and Zondervan Group Publisher Annette Bourland said that Zondervan is “working to support these standards by offering a diverse variety of books for every grade level, making it easier for educators, librarians and parents to find Common Core-compliant books.”

Meanwhile, Master Books is against Common Core. 

“We have not, and have no plans to, alight with the Common Core State Standards,” said Laura Welch, editor in chief for New Leaf Publishing Group. “New Leaf Publishing Group, which includes Master Books, adheres to the policy of upholding biblical standards of education.

“The idea that education may soon be controlled by the government is an unsettling thought,” the statement continued. “We create resources from a biblical worldview that teach the Bible as truth and draw from the Bible our world’s history and science. We believe families should be able to make their own educational decisions appropriate for their children, which adhere to their personal belief systems and exclusionary of false theories such as evolution.”

Despite the controversy, at press time Common Core had been adopted in all but five states, but implementation has been a challenge. Simon spoke of miscommunication surrounding the adoption of the new standards as well as an “accelerated timeline” that makes everyone feel “rushed.”

“Few of us like change,” she added, “and change at hyperspeed is rarely embraced when driven from the top down.”

General market store mishap underscores value of the service you provide

You may have heard that a Southern California Costco recently stocked copies of the Bible with a “Fiction” sticker on them. When a pastor noted the error and tried to get someone to help to no avail, he tweeted a photo of the Bible display and FOX News picked up the story.

Costco eventually corrected the error, issuing the following statement: “Costco’s distributor mislabeled a small percentage of the Bibles, however we take responsibility and should have caught the mistake. We are correcting this with them for future distribution. In addition, we are immediately relabeling all mislabeled Bibles. We greatly apologize for this error.”

I expect it quickly came to your mind, as it did to mine, that the “fiction Bible” error underscores the fact that Christian retailers likely know the Scriptures and related products better than general market retailers as a whole—and serve an important need in their communities. As a longtime customer of Christian retail stores, I am thankful for frontliners who keep displays in order and can answer questions from their significant knowledge of the products they sell.

Each year we celebrate the quality of their products in our Christian Retailing’s Best awards. With the 2014 awards season upon us, we look forward to seeing what publishers, authors, music labels, DVD companies and gift suppliers will deem worthy to nominate. What will they consider their best products from last year—and will Christian retailers and others from our industry agree? We’ll find out soon enough!

Finally, I remember a Christian retailer saying to me once that he never realized we would want feedback from our readers. I appreciated his honest surprise, but yes, we do! 

We value your honest assessment of our work at Christian Retailing and want to know if what we do every day is serving our readers well. So, our contact information is available to you in each issue (see p. 3), or if you’d like to get to know our editorial and advertising team members, visit our Contact Us page at www.christianretailing.com. 

At our website, you also will find a wealth of resources, including more news than we can fit into our print issue; links to our free digital issue; and the New Release Listing, with its abundance of new products. See you there!

The music video for Jason Crabb's “Love Is Stronger" has garnered a strong following online, earning the GRAMMY- and Dove-winning artist a spot on CMT.com's 25 Most Popular Artists list. The vocalist holds the No. 15 spot on the list, alongside artists such as Luke Bryan, Lady Antebellum, Garth Brooks and Kelly Clarkson.

“I'm very thankful to CMT for their support of this video,” said Crabb. “It was a special moment to partner with the Ashley DeRamus Foundation to bring awareness to special-needs individuals and honor the military and their families.” 

More consumers are completely finished with their holiday shopping than at this point last year, according to the Christmas & Holiday Shopping Forecast released today by America's Research Group and Inmar. Of the survey respondents, 48.3% report they are 90% or all done, compared with 45.2% this time last year. The report also shows more consumers who are parents say they have finished shopping for their children, with 60.2% completely done as compared to 52.6% this time last year.

Of those consumers not yet finished their holiday shopping, 22.2% (versus 15.9% last year) say it's because they're not getting the really big discounts; and these holdouts are planning to wait until the last three days to finish up their Christmas shopping.

Word Entertainment is partnering with Mark Burnett, Roma Downey and their production company LightWorkers Media to release SON OF GOD: Music Inspired by the Epic Motion Picture on Dec. 26. The 12-song collection, a musical companion to the Twentieth Century Fox feature film Son of God due out Feb. 28, features music by top Christian artists, including Chris August, Big Daddy Weave, Jason Castro, Everfound, For King & Country, Love & The Outcome, Point of Grace, Sidewalk Prophets and Group 1 Crew.

Artists included on the album have a combined total of 45 No. 1 hits and 25 Dove Awards. Also included on the compilation is “Oh, Son of God,” a brand-new song by GRAMMY-nominated, Dove-Award winning artist Francesca Battistelli.

Christian Retailing’s Inspirational Gift Mart Bulletin is on hiatus for the holidays until Wednesday, Jan. 8.

While we take a Christmas break with our gift e-newsletter—though we will cover major gift news in Christian Retailing Update—you may wish to sign up if you are not already a subscriber to Inspirational Gift Mart Bulletin. Keep in touch with gift news in the Christian market with the Bulletin, which comes to your inbox free of charge each Wednesday.