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Friedersdorf’s Challenge to SSM Supporters
Conor Friedersdorf has a long piece challenging Same-Sex Marriage proponents to answer whether they think the uproar over Memories Pizza is justified:
The question I’d ask those who want to use non-state means to punish mom-and-pop businesses that decline to cater gay weddings is what, exactly, their notion of a fair punishment is.. If their Yelp rating goes down by a star does the punishment fit the “crime”? Is there a financial loss at which social pressure goes from appropriate to too much? How about putting them out of business? Digital mobs insulting them and their children? Email and phone threats from anonymous Internet users? If you think that any of those go too far have you spoken up against the people using those tactics?
He adds this zinger at the end:
I’d be fascinated to how many grandparents of mob participants oppose gay marriage and what degree of social stigma they would want directed toward them.
A functioning small-l liberal society requires both that people have a bit of a thick skin, and that they generally offer their fellow citizens some grace and decency when they disagree; life-ruining social remonstrance and disgrace of the kind we’ve seen in the last week should be reserved only for the most reprobate and hateful behavior.
No matter one’s opinion on SSM, declining to cater a hypothetical gay wedding — but not gay people otherwise — does not rise to that level; dare I say, it cannot be rationally defended. No one was harmed by their answer and, even if the hypothetical had been real, the harm would still have been minuscule.
I’d like to encourage everyone to post the piece on Facebook and to — politely — ask their liberal friends for their response. If you get anything good, let us know about it.
Published in Culture, Religion & Philosophy
@Salvatore
That the threats were not local. (Sorry, but Rocochet android has given up any pretense of woking.)
Basil- While one cannot be absolutely sure about the matter, those familiar with the demographics, religious, and political makeup of Walkerton (I’m more familiar than I’d really care to be, having been involved in a county election last fall) will tell you that the likelihood of any of the threats originating among its 2,400 largely conservative Christian residents is slim to nil.
Salvatore Padula
Basil- While one cannot be absolutely sure about the matter, those familiar with the demographics, religious, and political makeup of Walkerton (I’m more familiar than I’d really care to be, having been involved in a county election last fall) will tell you that the likelihood of any of the threats originating among its 2,400 largely conservative Christian residents is slim to nil
It’s a good thing progressives are incapable of travel.
Yup, their preoccupation with limiting their carbon footprints is certainly an advantage for us.
I’ve been stigmatized by two of my children as a bigot.
The sentiment that the Memories Pizza folks are OK because they came out of this with hundreds of thousands of dollars, that the abuse was worth it, and the death threats were immaterial is disgusting.
I’m thankful that things seem to be ending well for the Memories Pizza folks. There was no guarantee when the story broke that this would be the case however. And there is no guarantee that it will be the case with future targets of the mob.
Rick Wilson makes the point in his post Here’s What Happens When It’s Okay To Punish People’s Beliefs on The Federalist:
At some point, the social-justice warrior crowd is going to incite their people into something more than Ferguson or Occupy or Internet harassment. At some point, their fanatic desire to erase God from the hearts and minds and actions of red America will cross a threshold. Someday, in some town, a Christian shopkeeper who becomes the focus of the 4chan or Reddit Rage Machine will be killed by some militant atheist or black bloc kid or some other flavor of crazy. That day, their rage won’t come from the click of a mouse, but from the barrel of a gun.
That’s what I thought.
It does show how desperate the “reporter” was that a pizza place in a town of 2,400 was asked whether it would cater a gay wedding.
Zafar
” Ray Kujawa:Am I out of it? People order pizza for a wedding?
That’s what I thought.”
It’s bad enough to question the right of gays to marry. It’s even worse to question their wedding traditions.
Perhaps a small pizzeria in a town of 2,400 is raking it in. In truth, I don’t know. The O’Connor family has not yet responded to my request for a full accounting, Basil. But I’m quite nearly certain that a cool million is a helluva lot of money to these people (as it would be to me), and that they’d probably barely net that if they worked for the rests of their lives at this. And, they’ve now got a level of name recognition and notoriety that they likely never would have attained, and I’m guessing their views on this subject did not offend hardly any of their vastly increased new clientele. They’re now far better off financially than they likely would have been absent this event.
I don’t mean to trivialize death threats, but the likelihood is that they’re of the Internet whacko variety, not the stalking, in person kind.
And, Nick, if it’s disgusting to say that making an $840,ooo windfall in exchange for 15 minutes of scorn from hysterical liberals in search of their Selma moment isn’t a terrible trade-off, then you’re going to be disgusted morning, noon, and night.
Also, we’ve got to hope that if the liberal Twitter outrage machine makes instant millionaires out of its targets, then there’ll be a deterrent effect.
I agree, gts. But, setting aside the (unintentional, I hope) implication that the pizza parlor owners somehow colluded with the TV reporter to inciting the mob for personal profit, I’d guess that any contributions the pizza people received pale in comparison to the contributions Big Gay ginned up for itself by the Indiana RFRA controversy. Perhaps we could ask them for an accounting.
I was in no way implying that the O’Connors asked for this or that it was a part of a conspiracy. No one could have predicted this course of events.
Are you kidding? Unless you assume that pizzeria held some kind of special place of hatred for the people who wanted it publicly humiliated, it makes no difference whether they’re princes or paupers in the aftermath. Getting to humiliate a governor on national television is a far bigger deal.
Yes, that is the sad part of this struggle. My daughter in law looks at me like I am some old idiot without even trying to understand the big picture, I just shrug and hope that one day she will see what she is misjudging about me and many others.
Also at Ryan – 1) If, hypothetically, they had denied service in this case and a lawsuit had been lodged against them, wouldn’t they very quickly go through that money defending themselves?
2) Having gone out of business, is it still possible for any entity or even the State to bring any kind of lawsuit against the proprietors? In other words, have they protected themselves from being sued by taking themselves out of the market?
I know this will seem a bizarre possibility, but given the number of people on the left that were initially ticked off by their statement, and adding insult to injury the windfall, I have to think there are people out there who are going to want to make the owner suffer. Despite them having been the target of death threats, I’m not ruling out the possibility that if this continues to fester, that the proprietor could be brought up on hate crime charges. That would require federal prosecution, wouldn’t it?
Titus, it seems like making instant millionaires out of your political enemies would be a deterrent to attacking them. The intent of the nasty Yelp reviewers, I’m sure, was to sully the O’Connor’s reputation and drive them out of business, not to enrich them.
I agree with you that Pence caved hard and unnecessarily, and that’s a big accomplishment for left wingers.