A revitalized local chapter of the National Organization for Women wants the People’s Food Co-op to boycott Eden Foods. They’re angry at the Clinton company’s lawsuit challenging a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires companies to include contraceptive coverage in their employee health insurance plans. Represented by the Domino’s Farms-based Thomas More Law Center, the company and its owner, Ann Arborite Michael Potter, argued that the requirement “attacks and desecrates” his Catholic faith.

In a 2013 interview with Salon.com, Potter hinted that religion wasn’t his only motivation: “I don’t care if the federal government is telling me to buy my employees Jack Daniel’s or birth control. What gives them the right to tell me that I have to do that?” An appellate judge quoted that “anti-government screed” in rejecting the lawsuit. But last year, the Supreme Court ruled that another private company, Hobby Lobby, could deny birth control coverage for religious reasons. Eden and Potter went back to court, and this time they won.

The defeat galvanized local feminists. After the co-op board first scheduled, then canceled, a membership vote, NOW members and other boycott backers have been standing outside the Fourth Ave. store with petitions to demand a vote on the issue.

General manager Lesley Perkins says the co-op sold about $63,000 worth of Eden products last year. While that’s only about 1 percent of its total sales, Perkins doesn’t want to give it up–sales are flat, and the co-op is losing money. Besides, she argues, whatever the co-op does isn’t going to change Potter’s mind: “We’re such a tiny fish in his giant pond.” But board president Ann Sprunger emails that she sees nothing positive in “women’s ability to choose their own reproductive path being determined by their employer.”

Boycott supporters need 800 signatures, and as the Observer went to press they were cautiously optimistic they’d meet a June 22 deadline. If they succeed, a vote of the co-op’s 8,000 members will follow.

To the Observer:

Thank you for your coverage of the effort by a group of member-owners of the People’s Food Coop (PFC) to put to a membership vote a possible boycott of Eden Foods products. I’d like to clarify that this effort is the work of coop members who organized, communicated with the board for months and collected signatures from the coop membership. While some members of the Washtenaw chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) support such a boycott and some members of NOW have worked to put the issue on the ballot, this effort has not been driven by NOW. The effort began with several coop members attending the PFC board meetings after the July 2014 Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case that allows employers to deny coverage of birth control based on religious beliefs.

Sincerely,

Ann Rodgers