So, Stacey Campfield, a state senator in Tennessee, was refused restaurant service after sponsoring anti-gay legislation and spouting hateful rhetoric:
Martha Boggs, owner of The Bistro at the Bijou, refused to serve Campfield, who has compared homosexuality to bestiality and claimed that one cannot contract AIDS through heterosexual sex.
So, of course, he did what any white, heterosexual Christian state senator might do in his situation: he wrote a blog post discussing his treatment and comparing himself to black people who endured institutional segregation and discrimination during the Civil Rights era.
Facepalm:
He goes on to show how multicultural he is by relating this anecdote about lunch counters:
In the '60s my grandfather sat at the lunch counters with the blacks in Knoxville to help break up the segregation of the races. I guess some people still support segregation. Just segregation of thought. Some people have told me my civil rights were violated under the 1964 civil rights act in that a person can not be denied service based on their religious beliefs. (I am catholic and the catholic church does not support the act of homosexuality) I had not thought about that much.
I just figured this is just another example of the open minded tolerant left. They claim tolerances for divergent points of view.....Until someone actually has one. Then they don't know how to handle it.
I'm not sure which part of his treatment was similar to the systematic and deliberate mistreatment of an entire race of people for centuries upon centuries. The dude was told that he couldn't eat at a restaurant because the owner was offended by his bigotry, so he went to eat at another restaurant.
Segregation involved institutional visible and physical separation of the races. There were separate water fountains, separate places to sit on buses. There were not only laws propping up this system but people grew up with the knowledge that those were just the rules and if you were black you were automatically forced to live an entirely separate life, from birth, just because of your skin color.
This dude was asked to go eat somewhere else because his bigotry offended the owner of the restaurant. There's no comparison. Even if I disagreed with the owner about this decision (and I most definitely agree with her one hundred per cent) this is still not comparable.
And of course this isn't all he decided to say in his post. He decided that along with painting himself as a civil rights hero and fighter of Jim Crow, he'd continue attacking people who are LGBT.
Campfield claims that his rather odd and antiquated views about people who are LGBT are backed up by the CDC, and Nashville Scene does an excellent job destroying his lies:
We're not sure which CDC Campfield is referring to, but for sake of argument, we'll assume it's the Center for Disease Control, whose own website not only reveals that AIDS didn't come from "some guy who screwed a monkey," but that you can get it from regular, God-fearing vaginal intercourse as well, because it's the most common form of HIV-AIDS transmission in the world.
But Campfield does more than cherry-pick his CDC stats. His other notable citations are a Christian apologetics website called The Road to Emmaus; the pro-life/anti-choice site Life Site News, a propaganda organ for the fear-mongering Campaign Life Coalition; and a letter to the editor of The Straight Dope from 1988.
Facts, of course, mean very little to people like Campfield, except for when they're not really facts at all yet retain an overall shape of truthiness to further a fact-averse agenda.
Ouch.
Sign the MoveOn petition to fire Campfield