From Phi Beta Cons (via Instapundit):
Writing on NRO today, Frederick Hess examines the recent flap at the University of Maryland, where a student wearing a pro-Israel shirt was indignantly told by a cashier at the Maryland Food Collective that “Your shirt offends me. I won’t ring you up.”
The student was able to get another cashier to complete the transaction, but the episode led to a big flap over the rights of customers and cashiers. A spokesperson for the Food Collective says, “no one should have to have contact with people whose views they find hurtful.”
As PBC blogger George Leef then observes, surely such a right would also apply to an employer who found union representation odious.
Or not.
Anyway, from the Hess article linked above, I found this simply astounding:
[M]ore instructive than Lazarus’s [the student’s] ability to finally buy her groceries has been the aftermath. After an hours-long, “teary” meeting between Lazarus, her friends, and the collective, the coop agreed that it would serve any customer who wasn’t physically or verbally abusive, but that workers offended by a customer’s politics could arrange for another clerk to serve a patron.
The president of the university’s Pro-Israel Terrapin Alliance opined, “The arrangement we worked out, while not ideal, is a reasonable accommodation. I would not want to force anyone to act against their own political beliefs.”
Wow. Way to go on offense. No wonder your acronym is PITA. Pull your head into your shell and pretend there’s not a problem.
The Left in this country needs to reexamine its basic principles. Most of them aren’t logically consistent…kind of like the Left itself.
But the Right and anyone else victimized by the Left also needs to learn to stand up for themselves and call a spade a spade. This “accomodation”, as the PITA prez puts it, is far from “reasonable”.
Oh:
Ironically, the University of Maryland’s “human rights code” prohibits discrimination on the basis of political beliefs, along with sex, race, and so on. The university’s student union director, Gretchen Metzelaars, was, however, unable to convince members of the coop that they had discriminated.
Well, what a shock that must have been.
Read the whole thing. It’s depressing and I don’t want to be depressed all by myself.
Depressing indeed. I guess if I did not want to serve blacks or Mexicans or women at my lunch counter that would be OK? The left has gone so far left they are almost clear to the right with the KKK.
Indeed. This logic negates the rights asserted by Rosa Parks and the men who sat at the lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. But I’m thinking that was the farthest thing from the hive mind of the Maryland Food Collective when they refused to serve a white girl wearing a pro-Israel T-shirt.
And apparently it was the farthest thing from her mind, too.