Dear Right-Wing Snowflakes: Bite Me

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Nondiscrimination in public accommodations, housing and jobs is an important principle to liberals. It’s not an important principle to the Right, which has a long history of what we might call creative interpretation of the Constitution to find “rights” to discriminate, based on religion or a backward reading of “freedom of association.”

Last year White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders let it be known that the White House had no problem with businesses hanging antigay signs that explicitly state they don’t serve LGBT customers. Perhaps the Red Hen restaurant should have posted a sign saying they don’t serve liars and hypocrites before Sanders went to dinner there. But if I could explain anything to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, it would be that once you allow discrimination, you don’t get to whine when the hammer falls on you.

In short, either businesses get to discriminate, or they don’t. Make up your mind.

The American Right is largely made up of people who are incapable of understanding that the Golden Rule also works in reverse: What you want to be allowed to do unto others can also be done unto you.

Of course, systemic racism has allowed white people special privileges to discriminate racially, consequence free, for a long time.  But as those days are at least beginning to draw to a close, it might be argued that public shaming and shunning is just tough love to teach the slow-learning sots the value of antidiscirimination laws.

For example, recently Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Republican and knee-jerk Trump supporter, needed a police escort to leave a movie theater in Tampa because members of the audience were harassing her. (The film was Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which makes this story even better.)

Bondi was not happy.  “When you’re violent and cursing and screaming and blocking me from walking into a movie, there’s something wrong,” she said. “The next people are going to come with guns. That’s what’s going to happen.”

Maybe. But nobody with guns came after these people, who were caught on video screaming at a black family in a resort swimming pool in Tampa.

Dr. Covey Banks took to Facebook with her story of being harassed and racially taunted by a white family at Omni Orlando Resort while in the pool. It all started when Banks noticed a little girl crying to her mother about needing to use the rest room.

In her Facebook post, Banks recounted hearing the girl’s mother tell her daughter to just pee in the pool.

“The little girl was crying and begging her mother to take her to the bathroom. The mom started looking around we presumed for the bathroom, and we pointed it out to her … She started yelling ‘you don’t know what MY daughter is saying,’ ‘I’m taking her to the bathroom,’ ‘I was not telling her to pee in the pool (guilty conscience), etc. Figuring she was embarrassed because she got caught being nasty, we paid her no mind,” she stated.

But then the white family ganged up on Dr. Banks and her children and screamed racial epithets at them. When there’s violent cursing and screaming at people who are respectable patrons of the resort using the resort pool, there’s something wrong.

The altercation was being recorded by Dr. Banks’s neice. The matron of the white family tried to grab the phone out of the girl’s hand, and Dr. Banks grabbed the woman’s arm to stop her. In true redneck snowflake fashion, the white woman then declared she’d been assaulted.

Tampa police were not helpful. This is just what happens in Pam Bondi’s Florida, I take it. The Omni Orlando Resort refused to intervene and remove the rednecks from the resort. However, when the video of the altercation went viral, the resort issued an apology to Dr. Banks.

I agree with AG Bondi that it’s dangerous when people show up with guns, like this guy in Charlottesville last year.

But, you know, wingnuts are the ones who insist on being able to carry any firearm they like anywhere they want. They count on the indulgence of the rest of us, who really don’t get our jollies by intimidating people with scary-looking weapons. If the Left were as violent as the Right, we’d be having open warfare in the streets in this country. And on those rare occasions righties really are held accountable for their bad behavior, they feel soooo sorry for themselves.

Now we lefties are getting fingers wagged at us, and once again we’re being told to be civil. I’m all for civility, but it would be nice if the same standard of public decorum were applied to the Right as well. I never support violence, no matter who is perpetrating it. But as Josh Marshall says, “Many calls for civility are simply calls for unilateral disarmament from those protesting injustices and abuses of power.”

The Right doesn’t want civility, because they aren’t about to practice it themselves. They just want us to shut up.

Josh Marshall continues,

One might further note that it is simply too comical to be lectured about social decorum by a party whose members shouted “You lie” at a President during a State of the Union address and made Donald Trump their party leader. But even that is really beside the point. What does matter is where we draw the lines of what’s legitimate and what’s not. Most of the civility talk isn’t about any real red line, any boundary that is critical to the kind of free society we want to preserve and build. It’s more a wet blanket meant to tsk tsk legitimate protest and legitimate resistance to corrupt government, misrule and injustice.

And I say that if a baker can’t be compelled to bake a cake for a gay wedding, then a chef can refuse to cook for Sarah Sanders. And it wouldn’t be that difficult to make a freedom of religion case for that.

24 thoughts on “Dear Right-Wing Snowflakes: Bite Me”

  1. As I keep saying, Sarah had no business eating out when she could have been home cleaning the cages she keeps her own kids in. I am sure the immigrant children are being given care as good as the Trumpians give their own, aren’t you?

     

  2. Somehow I suspect the right wing would be perfectly happy for its spokespersons and officials to be booed out of restaurants and theaters if, in return, the left agreed to reinstate the right to unlimited discrimination in public venues. "See what it feels like?" is an ineffective argument against people whose entire point is that they don't feel anything for entire classes of people unlike themselves.

  4. The American Right is largely made up of people who are incapable of understanding that the Golden Rule also works in reverse: What you want to be allowed to do unto others can also be done unto you.

    ah, but the Golden Rule is clearly subordinate to the sacred right of the conservative to be an a-hole.

  5. A lot of people, especially in the media, have forgotten or choose to ignore that Bondi is Trump's A/G in Florida. She is exactly what Trump is angry that Sessions is not. She'll ignore the law to give Trump shade, and Trump is quite willing to reward her, even illegally.

    http://fortune.com/2016/09/12/trump-foundation-bondi-florida-ag/

    I don't know if this is WHY she was heckled, but if I saw her, I'd heckle her for being Trump's poodle. Might use a different word for poodle – rhymes with witch.

  6. I've been on FB with this discussion. IMO, the point that MUST be repeated, emphasized, shouted and driven is that we are not harassing republicans over differences in policy. I’m not anyway. The tax giveaway was a horrid idea, but it was legal and only political.

    Trump, through his lawyer, declared himself above the law when he said he could pardon himself. The proof that foreign policy is driven by Trump's personal enrichment is obvious. Obstruction of Justice is prima facie evident. The repeated issuance of illegal directives shows Trump's contempt for the law. Trump's affection for dictators is a matter of record as is his desire to roll back freedom of the press. People who enable any of it by being members of the administration are enabling ALL of it. 

    We need to emphasize that though we disagree with George Will and we mocked Krauthammer, they recognized that the GOP has turned to authoritarianism and NOT conservatism. Being a Nazi or white supremacist and being welcomed into the GOP means the party of Lincoln has a stench that only a refutation of the evil can dispel. Conservatives who are leaving Congress and clearly see the threat to democracy that xenophobia is should be applauded. We will face conservative non-fascists later and bang heads on ideas but minus the institutional racism and nationalism. 

    The GOP can be better than being a haven for hate and tribalism. I welcome the return of ideas I do not agree with, when conservative thinking respects equality and the principle of one-person one-vote. It wasn't that long ago that the GOP was the party which best represented people of color against the solid south – entirely racist democrats.

    We need to be asking, as Americans, "Where is the Grand Old Party that was?" The people we are heckling look nothing like those Americans that once were great, even with a different set of values than I have.

  7. Amen to this piece.  Another tsking issue, one that BooMan points out today, is the role of reporters in the New York-Washington circuit protecting their friends and sources. A governor can wag her finger in the face of the first African American president with barely a harrumph from these folks, as Arizona’s governor did, but they all go to bat for one of their friends when she’s politely asked to leave a restaurant.  

  10. "The American Right is largely made up of people who are incapable of understanding that the Golden Rule also works in reverse"

    You could have just ended at understanding! They understand almost nothing beyond what they see and hear in right-wing hate media. As long as FAUX news is on the air we are doomed, all these know-nothing mouth breathers get vindication for their ignorance 24/7 on FAUX news. We are screwed and have been for awhile, tRump just makes it all the more obvious!

  12. JDM,

    "Liars are not a protected class."

    How could they be?

    They have no class whatsoever, and hence, they are completely classless?

    You can't protect what's not there.

  13. "It wasn't that long ago that the GOP was the party which best represented people of color against the solid south – entirely racist democrats"

    Really, the GOP has been stealing presidential elections and playing the race card southern strategy since I was in grade school. The last real conservative to sit in the white house was Eisenhower, his term ended the week before I was born? I'm not sure what you mean by "not that long ago" but I'm in my late 50's? Yeah many democrats were outright racists

  14. Lowly restaurant owner has a No shirt, No shoes, No BS = no service policy and enforces it.  Standard American stuff and not too unusual.

    Lofty press secretary tweets her displeasure with a bit of a legal faux pax.  Somewhat odd for a ranking American spokesperson but not too serious.

    Highest executive in the land tweets a bunch of childish gibberish after getting his feelings hurt again.  Again again.  For the eleventy billionth time again.  Various “Red Hen”s across the land, many nowhere near the actual incident, are hurled everything from nasty fake online reviews to death threats by said highest executive’s followers, who clearly have no idea what America is supposed to be all about.

    Something tells me that if all of the latter were magically sent away to oblivion, America might suddenly become great again.

  15. “The next people are going to come with guns. That’s what’s going to happen.” she said wishfully.  Her people, of course.  "Gun down those booing liberals, its an assault on my personal safety, so shoot them for hating my guts."

     

  18. There has been no leftwing since the weathermen in the seventies.

    The right has claimed moral and patriotic superiority ever since.

    Now they rail against political correctness because Trump is as nasty as they want to be.

    He is what they want to be,rich and unaccountable. So when the rest of us shame the Trump cult publicly, they whine and can't take what they want to dish out. Bullies who are shocked when confronted.

  19. Well, the right has succeeded.  The Supreme Court has proven it is filled with right wing racist thugs.  Just like the president*.

  22. grannyeagle…I wasn't endorsing that song as being on my favorites list. That's the song that came up when I searched to find out what the #1 song  was for the week prior to Kennedy's inauguration. After going back to check on the accuracy of my posting, I see that Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961..and for some reason I thought it was 1960. That's what happen when you get old. The years just melt all together.

    Sometimes the dates and the facts of events gone by do get a little clouded, but as long as I keep the fact that Trump is a big bag of shit clear in my mind I'll know that I still retain a firm grip my intellectual acuity.

    Here's a song that is on my favorites list from around that period..it has a very special meaning to me.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgqMW4CHClk

    uncledad..didn't mean to creep you out. It's not like I posted a rendition of Old Dan Tucker.

     

  23. Swami,

    It is odd that the songs of the early 60's are quite different from the stuff I associate with the 60's. They sound much more sanitary, 50's type stuff? Anyway my favorite song from the 60's has always been Them's version of a great Dylan tune! I remember I always thought it was the stones!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6WTV88B3ao

  24. Seems these snowflakes are quite hurt when judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin. I toast their tears.

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