By Marc Jampole
A coordinated rightwing effort raises $840,000 for a pizza
joint in a small town in Indiana through crowd-sourcing when the pizza place
supposedly closed down in the face of an avalanche of threats after the owners
told local news media that it wouldn’t cater a same-sex wedding.
Doesn’t it smell a little cheesy? And not the fresh buffalo
mozzarella you sometimes get in upscale enotecas
in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.? No, this is definitely a phony processed
cheese product that’s stayed in the back of the fridge far too long that we’re
whiffing here.
Let’s start with the question unasked so far by any of the
horde of pundits who have commented on Memory Pizza’s venture into social
significance: Who serves pizza at a wedding? A Bar Mitzvah or Sweet Sixteen
party—sure! But a wedding?
My guess is that the local TV news reporter who first
covered Memory Pizza’s intolerant attitude towards those different from them
had spent the day asking multiple business owners whether they wouldn’t provide
services to an LGBT wedding and went into Memory’s Pizza out of desperation. Or
maybe Memory faxed out a news release about the superficially religious stance
its owners were taking. In either case, Memory’s closed down after dozens of
negative reviews on Yelp and what the owner says were a bunch of threatening
messages. No pickets at Memory’s doors, no rocks through its windows. Just
condemnation over social media. That certainly shows the courage of one’s
convictions—unless the owner knew that someone at Glenn Beck’s media empire was
going to stoke the fires of rightwing indignation at a crowd-sourcing site.
It’s perhaps the first entirely virtual cause célèbre ever;
Internet spread the original local TV story. Online expressions of ire were
enough to intimidate the pious pizza purveyors, who were supposedly rescued
from financial ruin by online ad hoc charitable contributions.
But at the heart of it all is the small fact that very few
people if anyone would order pizza for a wedding banquet, so the effect of the
new law on Memory’s ability to assert their so-called religious freedom was theoretical.
Note, too, that the handful of other small businesses who have said they would
refuse service to gays have not run into difficulties.
Does it sound familiar, all this hullaballoo about a
rightwing cause célèbre who turns out to be a little bogus?
Let’s start with Samuel
Joseph Wurzelbacher, AKA Joe the Plumber, who took on Barack Obama at an Obama
rally during the 2008 presidential campaign because Obama wanted to raise taxes
on people making more than $250,000. As it turned out, Joe the Plumber wasn’t
even registered as a plumber in his home state and made about $40,000 a year.
The McCain campaign and rightwing Republicans touted Joe as an example of the
average Joe and Jane being crushed by Obama’s tax proposals, but in fact this
particular Joe would have been helped by Obama’s plans.
Just as federal
subsidies help two of the three individuals in whose name the Competitive
Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed King v. Burwell, which seeks to overturn federal subsidies to
individuals who buy insurance on the federal healthcare exchange because there
is no state exchange in their states; the third plaintiff, by the way,
qualifies for Medicare. In other words, CEI filed a lawsuit in the name of
three victims who were not victimized in the slightest.
A variation of the phony victim of what the rightwing considers to be
pernicious Socialist-like programs of the left-leaning center is the phony
perpetrator from whom the right insists on protecting all of us. That’s
certainly the case with the dozens of voting restrictions passed by
Republican-controlled state legislatures over the past eight years. All have as
their stated purpose protecting American society from fraudulent voting, a
problem that statistically speaking does not exist. By statistically speaking,
I mean that there are less than a handful of cases of suspected fraud by
individual voters at the polls among the hundreds of millions of people to vote
over the past 30 or so years.
Just as the Bush II administration manufactured reasons to go to war in Iraq when there were none, so does the rightwing routinely manufacture victims, villains and heroes when none exist, all in the name of justifying duplicitous positions: laws that say they protect religious rights but really discriminate against gays or take rights from women; laws that say they protect us from voter fraud but really serve to make it harder for millions to vote; and policies they say will lead to growth and prosperity but only for those already rich and connected.
Just as the Bush II administration manufactured reasons to go to war in Iraq when there were none, so does the rightwing routinely manufacture victims, villains and heroes when none exist, all in the name of justifying duplicitous positions: laws that say they protect religious rights but really discriminate against gays or take rights from women; laws that say they protect us from voter fraud but really serve to make it harder for millions to vote; and policies they say will lead to growth and prosperity but only for those already rich and connected.
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