As an addendum to Jonathan Last’s piece about the bizarre willingness of liberals rushing to the defense of illiberal Muslims so long as it makes the GOP look bad, BuzzFeed has a nice story up today about a Muslim-American woman embracing her heritage and celebrating Eid. But BuzzFeed’s story contains this interesting anecdote about tracking down a halal butcher:
“I need two legs of lamb.”
“Sorry miss, we don’t serve meat to people we don’t know,” he said.
Was this guy for real?
“I need them for Eid. My name is Zainab.”
I leveraged my Muslim capital. He paused.
“When do you need it?”
Now, to be clear, I think business owners should be able to serve whoever they want to, just as customers should be free to avoid businesses they view as unfairly discriminatory. But imagine this same scenario where I call up a baker and say “I need a wedding cake,” and they respond “we don’t bake cakes for people we don’t know.” I then respond, “I need it for a wedding. I am a Christian who believes that marriage is between one man and one woman,” and they respond, “When do you need it?”
If anyone in a liberal city or state got wind of such a thing happening, that baker would be immediately dragooned before the local human rights commission, the state attorney general would take up a crusade, and/or the state labor commission would press charges on the grounds that doing this is discriminatory under public accomodation laws. Heck, if business owners merely have opinions about gay marriage, regardless of whether their business is discriminatory in who it hires or serves, this happens:
And yet, Muslims are somehow completely immune from being targeted in this culture war even though public accomodation laws demanding you serve people regardless of race, creed, sex, and sexual orientation are clearly being violated. This is not a hypothetical. In the last year, there have been ongoing legal sanctions against bakers in Oregon and Colorado for refusing to bake cakes for gay weddings. In both cases, the bakers weren’t even broadly discriminatory: They’re happy to serve gay customers, they just don’t want to participate in an event of religious significance that violates their beliefs.
At the same time, earlier this year, comedian Steven Crowder got Muslim bakeries on film refusing to bake cakes for gay weddings:
Now I have been covering issues of religious freedom and business owners extensively. Maybe there have been a few cases under the radar, but I haven’t heard of a single case of local or state authorities going after Muslim business owners for discrimination. If this has has happened, it certainly hasn’t become a national news story the way that nearly every Christian baker, florist, or wedding phtographer that objects to participating in gay weddings has — to say nothing about how the media went out of its way to seek out and demonize the one rural pizza parlor that wouldn’t cater gay weddings for the express purpose of demonizing Indiana’s legislature for passing basically the same religious freedom law nearly the entire Democratic party embraced in the ’90s.
And yet it’s undeniable Muslim businesses are discriminating on religious grounds at this very moment and somehow this is not completely rending the fabric of society. To be clear, I don’t wish the same stupid witch hunt on Muslims that’s been happening to Christian businesses. But the hypocrisy is stunning.
