Does an Oakland Cafe Owner Have the Right to Refuse Service to Police?

The owners of an Oakland cafe assert the right to deny service to police officers at their business.

I do not question their right. But why will they not honor the same right to bakery owners who don’t wish to sell gay wedding cakes? Why does freedom of association apply in one case, and not in another? That’s the great hypocrisy and contradiction known as “liberalism”. Because there’s nothing liberal about it, we should call it leftism.

The cafe owners cite the “physical and emotional safety” of their customers as a basis for turning away police. But couldn’t the bakery owner claim the same emotional safety in defense of not making wedding cakes for gay people? For that matter, couldn’t a white supremacist say the same about not wanting black, Hispanic or Asian people anywhere near his business? (The turned away police officer happens to be Hispanic, by the way.)

This is what happens when you fail to think in principles and, in fact, have no principles.

I challenge the rationality of the desire to refuse business to police officers. It’s those same police officers you’re counting on when it comes time to protect your property rights, especially when you favor — as these cafe owners undoubtedly do — bans on the ownership of guns.

In an almost laughable irony, the owners of the cafe called the police when opponents of their discrimination began to protest outside their business. Think about this. They oppose police officers as threats to the emotional and physical safety of their customers. Yet they’re happy to scream for the police when they need them. The laughable, twisted reality is that this is how “progressive liberals” think and act. They sneer at anyone who dissents and they see no contradiction in any of it. Truly amazing.

By the way, as a therapist, I have used the concept of “emotional safety” for years, with clients in therapy. Emotionally unsafe people are ones you cannot rely on, who don’t keep their word, or who are deliberately nasty and hateful to people they claim to love or otherwise value. The solution is not to call the police or issue restraining orders. Those are reserved for physically unsafe people, not emotionally unsafe ones.

Using the concept of emotional safety to impose one’s social and political views on the entire population is where these leftists are headed, as we know from their continuing efforts to restrain speech, control the Internet, control health care and education, outlaw weapons of self-protection and erode the rights of property and association — for everyone but themselves.

 

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