If the Biden administration were serious about civil rights, it would investigate and probably sanction a Richmond restaurant for refusing to serve members of a Christian advocacy group. But Biden’s administration doesn’t care about civil rights.
The restaurant is, by law, under Title II of the Civil Rights Act, a “public accommodation” that may not discriminate against patrons “on the ground of … religion.” A public accommodation is defined as, among other things, “any restaurant, cafeteria, lunchroom, lunch counter, soda fountain, or other facility principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises.” The same law says the U.S. attorney general has the power (and, arguably, the ethical obligation) to seek an injunction against the restaurateur who denies service in a public accommodation.
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A WARNING FOR THE FBI AND HOPE FOR THE NATION
On Nov. 30, 90 minutes before the Family Foundation‘s reservation, the Metzger Bar and Butchery called the group and said the reservation, which had been made weeks in advance, would not be honored because of the foundation’s religious beliefs. To be clear, in the very first sentence of its “who we are” explanation on its website, the Family Foundation identifies itself as a “non-partisan, faith-based organization.”
The restaurant wasn’t enforcing a neutrally applicable rule such as “no shirt, no shoes, no service,” nor was it being asked to participate in any ceremony that violated the faith of the restaurant’s owners. Members of the Foundation were there to avail themselves of the public accommodation to dine. Yet the restaurant publicly and proudly announced it was refusing service on the basis specifically of the content of the group’s faith beliefs, which the restaurant re-labeled as a set of political beliefs that allegedly (in a tendentious description) “seeks to deprive women and LGBTQ+ people of their basic human rights.”
If the restaurant were being asked to provide a content-expressive function for a ceremony or proceeding that the restaurateurs’s faith precluded — as in the 303 Creative case currently before the Supreme Court — it might have enjoyed a First Amendment exception to the Civil Rights Act. But this was neither an “expressive function” nor a “ceremony.” As Victoria Cobb of the Family Foundation put it, the restaurant’s “brazen act of discrimination was a shot across the bow at [traditional] Christians everywhere.”
Now, perhaps the Justice Department, upon investigation, could find a technical reason why Metzger’s is not guilty of violating the Civil Rights Act. Still, an investigation is in order. This is the same Justice Department that sent a 20-man FBI SWAT team at dawn into a pro-life activist’s home, in front of his seven young children, to arrest him for an alleged infraction not even close to violating the spirit of the law in question. Surely, the far more direct apparent violation of the bedrock Civil Rights Act should merit at least an inquiry.
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In an ideal world, this is the sort of thing the government would not police at all, absent invidious discrimination based on an immutable characteristic such as ethnicity. In the long run, the most condign punishment for Metzger’s would be for people of faith to stop dining there and perhaps ostracize its owners. Peaceful private remedies are often preferable to the government’s blunt power.
But if national civil rights legislation is to be enforced, it should be enforced even-handedly, even if the current leaders of the Justice Department don’t approve of the faith-based group to whom service is denied. If Metzger’s had denied service to a Muslim group which merely wanted to dine, not to hold a service, the Biden Justice Department doubtless would rush to aid the Muslims. If it won’t likewise protect Christian groups, the Justice Department itself is engaged in bigotry by omission.
