So I have read with interest the pizza-nazi story, wherein the store owners sincerely believed they should not have to serve gays. And of course the florist, also believing, sincerely apparently, that they too should not have to serve the gay.
Of course the most disheartening thing about these stories is the windfalls that crowd sourcing has provided them with for being a$$hats.
My very short question is simply this: how is this different from the Greensboro Woolworth that didnt want blacks at the lunch counter? Wouldnt you think logically that if one fought for one issue - the freedom to deny services, then one would fight for the other? Afterall, if I remember correctly, the religious argument at the time was that God had apparently separated the races and we liberals were encroaching on the beliefs of those that would help Him along in this effort.
And, with these new "freedom to be stupid" laws, what prevents this from returning?
But somehow it is different. At least in the rhetoric that the main stream media gives out. I think - just an observation here - that there are several differences:
1) The republican party is very different. While there were certainly the Jesse Helms types during the civil rights era, there were also many republicans that understood this was unsustainable for the country. Try to find one now. Even at the highest levels of power within the republican party, the right to be a loon is protected by gerrymandering and voter discrimination. The ideologically rigid world that the GOP now inhabits is its only route to power making them collectively unconcerned about the rights of those that do not make up their base.
2) The power to organize and wield influence. With leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, it was becoming clear that the economic consequences of continued bigotry could be leveled at a grand scale. In some perverse way, power respects only power, and these great leaders, in a subtle way, made this clear. Today, crowd funding takes a lot of the sting out of the immediacy of a boycott, but for how long? Will it continue to sustain the workers of these bigoted businesses? I doubt it. However it does make it harder to learn the lesson. I am not sure how the civil rights leaders of the past would have dealt with this, but combined with (1) I think it makes a difference.
3) The media has changed. Nothing is ever right or wrong. If you pick the wrong story line, that will hurt ratings. If you play to only one audience - such as Faux News, then your ratings are high but more than 50% of what you report is inaccurate. So news as an entertainment industry is also to blame for the differences.
4) The increasingly insular American landscape. It is no accident that the majority of T-baggers are monochrome, within a similar age bracket, and within a narrow band of economic achievement. We live in a time where it is really quite possible to go about our lives without ever really knowing a person of color, or a person with a different sexual orientation. We have repeatedly seen economic and political actions that reinstate the segregation of our society - based on all sorts of perceived differences. We also know that the outcome of these segregationist ideas is to decrease the community's empathy and understanding of one another. Politicos - at least the bad ones - play on this fear and misunderstanding fully. And because our communities are being led down the road of the "you dont have to get along" camp, then we dont. We can shut ourselves away and talk only to those that agree with us.
If you put these four things together... I wonder if we arent returning quickly to the Woolworth's of NC. I have said many times here in the KOS, it starts with the gay, were will it end? A one party system made up of rich white males reflecting the actual beliefs of only a very few? Neocons like to say liberals "hate America" but it seems to me that what they are grasping for is so anti-American that it indeed it sounds more like Stalinist Russia. Ironic.
Am I wrong?