Are you being served? That depends on who you are, where you are, and what the law is in the particular state, city, or precinct in which the service requested is placed.
Are you part of a “protected class,” someone whose race, sex, religion, color, ancestry, or country of origin puts you inside the sheltering arms of the government? Are you in such a jurisdiction where laws of this nature apply?
This is why a gay couple in Colorado were allowed to bring suit against an evangelical baker who declined to create a custom cake for their wedding on the grounds of discrimination against their sexual orientation. In contrast, Sarah Sanders, press secretary in the Trump administration, found herself without legal redress when asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., because the owner disliked her political views and/or acts.
But had the restaurant been in Seattle, the Virgin Islands, or even across the Potomac in the city of Washington, she could have sued the restaurant on the same grounds of denial of service on which the gays sued the baker. Those are the only three jurisdictions in the whole country to list discrimination on the grounds of political leanings as a possibly criminal matter.
If you feel put out by all this, so is Petula Dvorak, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, who sympathizes with the gay couple and with the restaurant owner in her aversion to Sanders’ opinions, but nonetheless thinks that the owner was wrong to refuse her professional services.
“We’re breaking the social contract of a civilized society,” she says, in ways that could strangle and paralyze the workings of markets. “How soon before I have to fill out a questionnaire making sure my personal philosophy aligns with my mechanic’s,” she asks us, “before he works on my brakes?”
This use of commerce as a weapon of politics emerged in 2016 even before the shock of November, when liberals tried to boycott Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, an attempt that quickly proved counterproductive as Trumpists responded by buying her products, whether they liked them or not. And there were the Yoga wars, where one woman canceled her membership when her spa offered bargain prices to women attending the anti-Trump rallies; and the head of the Solidcore studios responded in shock when Ivanka Trump (using a pseudonym) took one of her classes, saying she wished to “protect the community” that had formed in her franchise from harm.
Sorry, but if you see your real job as “community fostering,” you may be in the wrong line of work. If you dislike people’s politics, fight them politically, as Dvorak says wisely, working as hard as you can for your causes, while treating your patrons with the respect they deserve.
When it had become clear that Trump had won the election, a number of designers declared that they would never agree to dress the first lady, without having ever been asked. This equates to the baker’s refusal to create a cake specifically for a gay wedding. Fair enough, in both cases.
But if he had refused to sell a cake he had placed on the shelf to a gay couple, it would be a whole different story. A complaint would have clearly been justified.
Can we draw a bright line between artistic creation, where people ought not to be forced to violate their own sensibilities about supporting a particular cause or celebration, and commerce, in which the doors should be open to all well-behaved people, who, once inside them, are treated alike?
