Here’s the right-wing Christian movement and mindset in a nutshell: This week, they have been at the Supreme Court arguing that Christians should not be subject to civil rights laws requiring them to provide services to LGBTQ customers. Also this week, they are complaining all over the right-wing media about a “pro-life, pro-family group” being denied service at a restaurant.
The Supreme Court case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, is a “free speech” case on behalf of a web designer who does not do wedding websites but might do them if she wouldn’t then be subject to public accommodations laws requiring her not to discriminate against LGBTQ couples. Got that? It’s completely hypothetical—Lorie Smith hasn’t been subject to any kind of enforcement or legal penalty, and in fact, there’s reason to believe she recast her professional profile in order to be a plaintiff in this case—and it’s at the Supreme Court, where the right-wing justices appear very sympathetic to Smith’s right to start a new business founded on excluding some people, while the people who would be excluded are left out of the story.
But meanwhile, the Family Foundation of Virginia wants everyone—or at least everyone in the right-wing media—talking about how awful it was that their dinner reservation was canceled because the waitstaff at the restaurant realized exactly who was planning to hold an event there and said they wouldn’t serve the group.
RELATED NEWS: Supreme Court hears another pro-bigotry, anti-LGBTQ case and again proves its illegitimacy
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I’m not linking the coverage, but if you want to give them the clicks, you can find it at The Federalist, conspiracy theorist site WND, and probably others at well. At WND, the story is directly above an editor’s note opening, “Leftwing billionaire George Soros bankrolls everything evil.”
“The intolerant leftist mob is coming for Christians everywhere, and we were just the latest target in the way this past Wednesday night,” the Family Foundation of Virginia’s Victoria Cobb opens her Federalist piece.
"Our team and supporters were denied a meal for our beliefs,” Cobb continues, identifying the restaurant that refused to serve the group as Metzger’s Bar and Butchery in Richmond, Virginia. The restaurant’s official explanation for the canceled reservation, she explains, was “that our pro-life and pro-traditional-marriage positions violated the ‘basic human rights’ of women and LGBT individuals. What human right is more basic than the right to life? What family structure is more foundational than marriage between a man and a woman, the bedrock of Western civilization for thousands of years?”
We should be able to demand service from waiters and bartenders whose basic humanity and rights we reject, even as Team Christian is off at the Supreme Court arguing for the constitutional right to discriminate against people based on who they are.
Cobb then goes on to make the classic argument answered by Popper’s paradox of tolerance, casting it in almost demonic terms. Popper’s paradox is that a tolerant society is maintained by refusing to privilege intolerance. Time and again, we see intolerant people—like, say, the Family Foundation of Virginia—insisting that the tolerant must tolerate their intolerance.
”Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance,” Popper wrote. “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”
So here’s Cobb, about the staff at Metzger’s Bar and Butchery not being willing to serve a group dedicated to stripping them of their rights: ”This is the gospel of woke — the new intolerant religion controlling the left. Anyone who refuses to bow before their altar must be subdued, discriminated against, and punished. It’s a godless religion without mercy and without hope.”
Proud Boys are out here shutting down drag events through the constant threat and, too often, the reality of violence. Republicans are using the power of the government to pull books out of schools and libraries because they expose kids to non-hateful portrayals of LGBTQ people and people of color and to the idea that racism is a real thing in U.S. history and society. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing Christian legal organization, is at the Supreme Court arguing that web designers should be allowed to explicitly refuse service to LGBTQ people.
But service workers refusing to bring food to a group of bigots gathering for the specific reason of bigotry? A GODLESS RELIGION WITHOUT MERCY AND WITHOUT HOPE.
After complaining for however many paragraphs that this grievous intolerance was done unto the Family Foundation of Virginia, Cobb tried to square that a little bit with the supposed beliefs being argued at the court this week.
”At The Family Foundation, we believe individuals in private business should not have to violate their convictions, which for some, means not celebrating what God has declared sin. However, most, if not all, faiths not only allow for the provision of services, such as food, to those whom they tolerate, but they also encourage it,” she writes, in a weak attempt to draw a bright line between “celebrating what God has declared sin,” i.e. providing wedding services, and “the provision of services, such as food,” which is encouraged, I guess, as long as it’s not a wedding.
Boo hoo hoo, we are victims of exactly the kind of service-denial we have repeatedly gone to court to assert our own legal right to engage in, and it’s terrible. Without mercy and without hope, I tell you.
With the Republican Party gearing up to take the majority in the 2023 Congressional term, the disarray they have been experiencing the past six years is now at Keystone Cops-level hilarity. Markos and Kerry speak with Daily Kos Senior Staff Writer Joan McCarter. Joan covers the Congress day-in and day-out, and has done so for a decade. She gives Markos and Kerry an enjoyable blow-by-blow of the Republican mud wrestling match going on right now.
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The Supreme Court case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, is a “free speech” case on behalf of a web designer who does not do wedding websites but might do them if she wouldn’t then be subject to public accommodations laws requiring her not to discriminate against LGBTQ couples. Got that? It’s completely hypothetical—Lorie Smith hasn’t been subject to any kind of enforcement or legal penalty, and in fact, there’s reason to believe she recast her professional profile in order to be a plaintiff in this case—and it’s at the Supreme Court, where the right-wing justices appear very sympathetic to Smith’s right to start a new business founded on excluding some people, while the people who would be excluded are left out of the story.
But meanwhile, the Family Foundation of Virginia wants everyone—or at least everyone in the right-wing media—talking about how awful it was that their dinner reservation was canceled because the waitstaff at the restaurant realized exactly who was planning to hold an event there and said they wouldn’t serve the group.
RELATED NEWS: Supreme Court hears another pro-bigotry, anti-LGBTQ case and again proves its illegitimacy
Campaign Action
I’m not linking the coverage, but if you want to give them the clicks, you can find it at The Federalist, conspiracy theorist site WND, and probably others at well. At WND, the story is directly above an editor’s note opening, “Leftwing billionaire George Soros bankrolls everything evil.”
“The intolerant leftist mob is coming for Christians everywhere, and we were just the latest target in the way this past Wednesday night,” the Family Foundation of Virginia’s Victoria Cobb opens her Federalist piece.
"Our team and supporters were denied a meal for our beliefs,” Cobb continues, identifying the restaurant that refused to serve the group as Metzger’s Bar and Butchery in Richmond, Virginia. The restaurant’s official explanation for the canceled reservation, she explains, was “that our pro-life and pro-traditional-marriage positions violated the ‘basic human rights’ of women and LGBT individuals. What human right is more basic than the right to life? What family structure is more foundational than marriage between a man and a woman, the bedrock of Western civilization for thousands of years?”
We should be able to demand service from waiters and bartenders whose basic humanity and rights we reject, even as Team Christian is off at the Supreme Court arguing for the constitutional right to discriminate against people based on who they are.
Cobb then goes on to make the classic argument answered by Popper’s paradox of tolerance, casting it in almost demonic terms. Popper’s paradox is that a tolerant society is maintained by refusing to privilege intolerance. Time and again, we see intolerant people—like, say, the Family Foundation of Virginia—insisting that the tolerant must tolerate their intolerance.
”Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance,” Popper wrote. “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”
So here’s Cobb, about the staff at Metzger’s Bar and Butchery not being willing to serve a group dedicated to stripping them of their rights: ”This is the gospel of woke — the new intolerant religion controlling the left. Anyone who refuses to bow before their altar must be subdued, discriminated against, and punished. It’s a godless religion without mercy and without hope.”
Proud Boys are out here shutting down drag events through the constant threat and, too often, the reality of violence. Republicans are using the power of the government to pull books out of schools and libraries because they expose kids to non-hateful portrayals of LGBTQ people and people of color and to the idea that racism is a real thing in U.S. history and society. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing Christian legal organization, is at the Supreme Court arguing that web designers should be allowed to explicitly refuse service to LGBTQ people.
But service workers refusing to bring food to a group of bigots gathering for the specific reason of bigotry? A GODLESS RELIGION WITHOUT MERCY AND WITHOUT HOPE.
After complaining for however many paragraphs that this grievous intolerance was done unto the Family Foundation of Virginia, Cobb tried to square that a little bit with the supposed beliefs being argued at the court this week.
”At The Family Foundation, we believe individuals in private business should not have to violate their convictions, which for some, means not celebrating what God has declared sin. However, most, if not all, faiths not only allow for the provision of services, such as food, to those whom they tolerate, but they also encourage it,” she writes, in a weak attempt to draw a bright line between “celebrating what God has declared sin,” i.e. providing wedding services, and “the provision of services, such as food,” which is encouraged, I guess, as long as it’s not a wedding.
Boo hoo hoo, we are victims of exactly the kind of service-denial we have repeatedly gone to court to assert our own legal right to engage in, and it’s terrible. Without mercy and without hope, I tell you.
With the Republican Party gearing up to take the majority in the 2023 Congressional term, the disarray they have been experiencing the past six years is now at Keystone Cops-level hilarity. Markos and Kerry speak with Daily Kos Senior Staff Writer Joan McCarter. Joan covers the Congress day-in and day-out, and has done so for a decade. She gives Markos and Kerry an enjoyable blow-by-blow of the Republican mud wrestling match going on right now.
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