During the early afternoon on July 5, roughly a dozen activists convened outside of a Hobby Lobby located in Laurel, MD to stand up and demand justice for women in response to the Supreme Courts’ recent ruling against their rights to equal healthcare and access to contraceptives. This number quickly grew into 30 participants, mostly militant working women passing by whose solidarity spurred them to action.
The protest, called by Women Organized to Resist and Defend, was met with overwhelming approval from those passing by, both women and men alike. WORD activist Heather Benno kept up the energy by leading the chants and alerting the public that this demonstration extended beyond calling for equal healthcare rights for women who worked at Hobby Lobby, but to uphold further demands such as a living wage, affordable housing, and childcare for all women who face intensified oppression under the system of capitalism.
Speaking together after the demonstration, several women discussed how the importance of this struggle is to not only answer the immediate demands that they faced, but noted also that, “Today it’s women who want contraception, tomorrow it’s the LGBTQ community, the next day it’ll be those who aren’t of the right denomination of Christianity, or those who aren’t Christian at all.”
This highlights in particular the grave potential of these types of rulings in favor of the capitalists, who constantly seek to agitate the differences between working and oppressed people everywhere in their ravenous hunt for maximum profit at the expense of everyone else.
