Hobby Lobby Secretly Smuggled Ancient Mesopotamian Artifacts And I’m Oddly Okay With It

ItalianStallion8 years ago

There are two types of people who shop at craft stores: sorority girls and those who take grade school projects entirely too seriously. For the life of me, I’ll never understand why someone decided “let’s take 10,000 square feet plus of retail space and fill it with aisles of fabric, glue, and scented pinecones,” but here we are.

There’s one craft store I know about — Hobby Lobby — and I didn’t become aware of it for any reason other than it got sued by the Supreme Court a few years ago or something (I don’t really know how the law works). I’d gone a full three years without the words “Hobby Lobby” having any further impact on me until I turned on the news recently and saw that they were in trouble with the government… again.

How could something so pure and wholesome-sounding as a goddamn craft store have continued beef with the feds? Because apparently Hobby Lobby illegally smuggled Middle Eastern biblical material and artifacts into the country in their shipping containers. The pieces were thousands of years old; straight out of ancient Mesopotamia. Hobby Lobby got caught, fined a few million, and forced to return it all.

Goddamn Hobby Lobby. I thought you where just out there selling felt and stickers, but instead you where running around like a weird, reckless mix of Charles L. Lawrence and Indiana Jones. “Smuggling ancient Middle Eastern biblical material and artifacts into the United States” sounds like something the CEO of Chick-fil-A would do except much, much more badass. It sounds like the plot of a PG-rated version of a The Fast and The Furious/VeggieTales crossover. Major props to the owner of the Lobby for pulling an incredible power move. Dude smuggles millions of dollars of illegal antiques and just pays off a cool multi-million dollar fine as if nothing happened. Meanwhile, I got a $40 parking ticket at a bar last month and it was a dire financial situation for me.

Did the government really have to go and ruin Hobby Lobby’s little fun side business? I’m pretty sure loosening the regulations on importing biblical relics was a major part of Trump’s campaign platform, right in between building the wall and some kind of travel ban. Let’s be real: it oughta be legal. Victimless crime, and a common one at that. Who among us hasn’t smuggled priceless, irreplaceable antiques into the country in intentionally improperly-marked boxes? Just last month, I pushed some priceless heirlooms from King Tut’s tomb through United States Customs by putting it in a cardboard box labeled “Imported Male Rompers.”

Will I ever shop at Hobby Lobby? Absolutely not; but I sure as hell respect them. Now it’s just a matter of time before Hollywood turns this into some over-CGIed action movie starring Brendan Fraser..

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