We all remember what happened to Sweet Cakes By Melissa, Jack Phillips’s Masterpiece Cakeshop, and Memories Pizza in Indiana. Those are recent enough that the names are practically self-explanatory. But soft! What fresh contretemps through yonder website breaks?
A Virginia-based conservative Christian advocacy group was turned away from a local restaurant just an hour before their reservation last week.
A representative of the Family Foundation said he was frustrated after the group was turned away from Metzger Bar and Butchery last Wednesday. The group claims the refusal had to do with their religious beliefs.
According to Todd Gathje, Director of Government Relations for the Family Foundation, one of the owners of Metzger called a representative of the Family Foundation about an hour before the reservation time, saying that the group would not be dining in the restaurant.
“We’ve had events at restaurants all over the city and never encountered a situation like this,” Gathje said. “It’s no secret that we are very much engaged in the public policy debate on a number of controversial issues. But we never expected that we would be denied service at a restaurant based on our religious values or political beliefs.”
For businesses like restaurants, federal and state laws do not allow discrimination based on protected classes such as race, religion, sex and more, as defined by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But the myrmidons of the State will allow it this time, I’m sure. This time, the rejected customer is the wrong sort. Conservatives and Christians are not protected by the “public accommodation” provisions of civil rights law. We engage in “hate speech,” which the Left assures us is really “violence.” We will be told that even when such “speech” consists of religious and political positions expressed elsewhere than in the restaurant under discussion, it is not protected by the First Amendment and therefore opens us to selective discrimination.
It can’t hold. Two standards means no standard. Eventually the entire edifice, which demands arbitrary discrimination between protected and unprotected characteristics, behavior, and beliefs, will collapse. And we will see the return of a little sign that was once ubiquitous:
To Refuse To Serve Anyone.
And people and businesses will sort themselves out once more, as they did in those halcyon days of yore.
As one who strongly defends the right to discriminate, I find the journey initiated by the multiplication of such controversies to be in the right direction – a step back toward the time when a business owner had the same right to choose his commercial associations as you and I have to choose our friends. But the severe cognitive dissonance that’s been imposed on the majority of Americans will continue to torment men of good will until they lift the veil and admit – to themselves if no one else – that what is, is.
We don’t have to like it. We just have to accept it.
3 comments
The Family Foundation seems like it would be composed of a membership that was astute enough to know that this “Metzgers” was a den of vipers, and chosen to give its business dollars to a different venue. Or…. they knew what was likely to happen and went ahead with the express intent of initiating a confrontation that would provide an opportunity for some reverse lawfare. At this point, it is impossible to tell. I hope it is the latter and that they have lined up their legal resources to prosecute a civil rights action to bankrupt that particular hive of scum and villainy.
…and incompetence in gov’t, politics, law enforcement and the legal system is a charade and a facade. That incompetence is for a very well delineated purpose. Be sure of that.
now do muslims