Analogies: Reserving the Right to Refuse Service

Since there's been a lot of chatter about civility, I thought I'd pose a little thought experiment. Let's say you're the owner/manager of a restaurant. One night, you have a patron who uses racial slurs towards your staff (who are minorities). How do you respond?

Do you have the right to ask the customer to leave for harassing and intimidating your workers? Can you refuse them service? Legally, yes. Restaurants can kick any individual out for their behavior. What they can't do is refuse service to a class of people (like African Americans). People get kicked out of places for bad behavior all the time, and that includes using racial slurs.

Morally, also yes. I think most people would kick a racist out, stand up for their employees. And if they did it by asking the person politely to leave and refunded any charges they had made, most would consider it a rather civil response to an uncivil person.

So we're clear: in our society (America) we are okay with refusing service to racists.

Now, if you think using racial slurs to denigrate someone is racist, but you don't think an organization whose head routinely uses racial slurs and dehumanizing language towards minorities is racist, you might want to rethink your definition of racism.

If you think threatening someone in person is harassment, but a government official using the power of their position to threaten individuals with violence is not, you have strange notions of justice.

And if you think a person is responsible for their own words and actions, but won't condemn someone who chooses to lie in the defense of a corrupt organization which has repeatedly violated our society's mores and urged law enforcement to violate constitutional principles to punish their opponents, then I think you lack a sense of personal responsibility.

We all like to think that we can and should stand up to condemn racist, bigoted individuals who threaten ourselves or our neighbors. Just because that person does it as part of their job in the most important office in the land changes nothing. We have the right to refuse service and we need to start using it.