Way, way back in April 2015, long before anybody but Donald Trump dreamed that Donald Trump could ever get elected president of the United States, a TV station in South Bend, Indiana, interviewed the proprietor of a small-town restaurant called Memories Pizza. The state of Indiana had just passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, so naturally, the TV “reporter” asked the proprietor of Memories Pizza if she would ever cater a gay wedding. (Because after all, what’s a wedding without, um… pizza?) The proprietor replied that she’d refuse to participate in such a ceremony, on religious grounds. She wouldn’t refuse to serve gay people, she said, but she couldn’t participate in a gay wedding.
The segment aired on local TV in the middle of Flyover, USA.
Then all hell broke loose. Somehow this brief interview on a small station in Indiana became a national firestorm. You couldn’t be considered #woke in the spring of 2015 without lying about how bigoted and evil this small-town pizzeria was. You couldn’t sit at the cool kids’ table without hollering at the top of your lungs about what those “gay-hatin’ hillbillies” at Memories Pizza did.
Memories Pizza never refused to serve gay people. The “gay wedding” scenario never even happened. It was a hypothetical question. But that didn’t matter to the howling mob. Their outrage needed to be fed.
Fast-forward to the summer of 2018. Donald Trump is now in the White House, helped along greatly by the very same people who hounded Memories Pizza. And those people have learned nothing. In fact, they’ve actually gotten angrier and dumber and more hypocritical.
For example: On Friday night Sarah Huckabee Sanders was dining at the Red Hen, a restaurant in Lexington, Va., when the proprietor asked her to leave. Sanders left without incident. The proprietor, Stephanie Wilkinson, told WaPo:
“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation… I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals…”
Several Red Hen employees are gay, [Wilkinson] said. They knew Sanders had defended Trump’s desire to bar transgender people from the military. This month, they had all watched her evade questions and defend a Trump policy that caused migrant children to be separated from their parents.
In other words, a business owner ejected a customer for political reasons. This was a political act.
You may not think Wilkinson has the right to do this, but I disagree. A restaurant should be able to eject anyone, for any reason. Even if I disagree with the reasons. Hell, especially if I disagree with the reasons.
And our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left feel the same way, except when they don’t. Discrimination is bad, except when it makes them feel good.
Aren’t double standards wonderful? Isn’t it marvelous that the same people who tried to destroy Memories Pizza, just for giving the wrong answer to a hypothetical question, are now standing up for another business owner who actually refused someone service on moral and ethical grounds? Isn’t it great that they don’t care how hypocritical and outright insane they look to everybody else?
It’s not just Sanders who’s getting hit with the New Rules. If you have any affiliation at all with Trump, you’re now considered fair game. The “good guys” will scream at you in restaurants and movie theaters, protest in front of your house, blast out your private phone number to the whole world, call you a c*nt on national TV… whatever it takes to feed their outrage.
They’ll even try to kill you when you’re at baseball practice. Grandma Clinton lost, and now her acolytes must have their revenge.
The Obama administration was full of shameless liars, and I disagreed with most of their policies, but I don’t remember any of them ever getting kicked out of a restaurant. Hell, Obama separated illegal immigrants from their children and locked them up in cages, and yet his team could go eat wherever they wanted.
It’s almost as if Democrats don’t actually have any principles at all, but just tactics that they’ll use whenever they feel like it.
Almost!
I don’t like Trump, I don’t trust Trump, and I didn’t vote for Trump. Yet his enemies are now so crazy that I find myself forced to defend Trump. This doesn’t make me resent him. It makes me resent them.
P.S. I’ve never understood why Democrats want to force people to make food for them. Just as a practical matter. If you know someone is openly hostile to you, why would you want them handling your food? Gross!
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