NEW IDEAS IN RETAIL: A clothing store for the “certified straight” of Arizona

MMarizonabusiness2

And, yes, this post is in response to the bullshit legislation coming out of Arizona, which would allow business owners to deny service to those they suspect to be homosexual.

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15 Comments

  1. Eel
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 8:57 am | Permalink

    Every business in America should be mandated to have gay porn on its premises.

  2. My Turn to Help
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 9:15 am | Permalink

    For those of you who don’t read Maynard, here’s what I think it says:

    I have an idea for a pop-up store in Arizona. It’s an apparel store for men – straight, Christian men. We’d just sell your standard run-of-the-mill stuff. The thing that would set us apart would be our promise to sell to only confirmed non-homosexuals…

    When customers approach the counter, to make their purchase, we’d strap them to a blood flow monitor, to measure for engorgement, and then show them increasingly graphic gay porn.

    “Not even the semi-rigid will be served.”

  3. Elf
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 10:28 am | Permalink

    “Because Gay People Shouldn’t Wear Clothes” would be a great tag line for the business.

  4. John Galt
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 11:15 am | Permalink

    Why is it that we only talk about the rights of the gays and not the rights of the homophobes? Don’t I have a god-given right to hate?

  5. Elliott
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 1:07 pm | Permalink

    The engorgement, I suspect, would be directly proportional to the level of homophobia expressed.

  6. Whispering Willow
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 3:17 pm | Permalink

    Is that a 5% boner? I don’t think a 5% boner should count as gay. There needs to be a margin of error. A warm breeze could give you 5% engorgement, for chrissake. The bar needs to be set at 15% turgidity.

  7. Meta
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 3:29 pm | Permalink

    As Michigan Radio points out, we’re not much better here in Michigan than they are in Arizona.

    Michigan, like Arizona has no specific protections for LGBT people.

    And, according to the pollsters, three out of four people in Michigan believe they should be protected.

    Leslee Fritz is with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.

    “There is no federal law to prevent discrimination against the LGBT community and there is no law in Michigan that prevents it,” says Fritz. “So, there’s a gap between what people believe is right and what they believe is real and what is actual reality.”

    The Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act is Michigan’s law to prohibit discrimination. It includes protections for religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, family status, and marital status.

    But, if you’re gay, you’re just out of luck.

    “If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered in Michigan, you can be fired because of it, in fact, you can be fired because you are perceived to be whether you are in reality or not. You can be denied a place to live or kicked out of where you do live. You can be denied a public accommodation. For example, you can be turned away from a restaurant or a hotel,” Fritz explained.

    And since most people have no idea that’s Michigan’s law, the groups working for protections for LGBT people say the challenge is educating people in the state. Emily Dievendorf is Managing Director for Equality Michigan.

    “I think that the general populace wants to assume that Michigan’s further ahead than we are because they see the progress that the rest of the country is making on equality issues. The sad fact is that Michigan is way behind when it comes to civil rights and is embarrassingly behind when it comes to sticking up for all Michiganders, especially the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.”

    Read more:
    http://michiganradio.org/post/if-arizonas-bill-discriminate-surprises-you-you-wont-believe-whats-legal-michigan

  8. Eel
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 3:48 pm | Permalink

    If I were the shop owner, I would start with this image:

    http://markmaynard.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/beaumont3.jpg

  9. toad hall
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 4:53 pm | Permalink

    I’m hoping that it does get passed into law, if only because there’s a chance that we might see Steven Seagal: Lawman running into an Arizona restaurant to assist a terrified store owner who has been set upon by an army of gay men attempting to order pizzas.

    http://www.abc15.com/news/state/actor-martial-arts-expert-steven-seagal-teams-up-with-sheriff-joe-arpaio-in-new-reality-show

    http://www.vice.com/read/steven-seagal-is-the-lamest-guy-ever

  10. Meta
    Posted February 26, 2014 at 8:35 pm | Permalink

    Jan Brewer apparently hates Christians. She just vetoed the bill.

    http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/breaking-arizona-gov-jan-brewer-vetoes-anti-gay-religious-freedom-bill/politics/2014/02/26/83712

  11. Meta
    Posted February 27, 2014 at 10:25 am | Permalink

    It isn’t new that people use the Bible to excuse bigotry. They used the Bible to defend racism too.

    From Think Progress:

    Theodore Bilbo was one of Mississippi’s great demagogues. After two non-consecutive terms as governor, Bilbo won a U.S. Senate seat campaigning against “farmer murderers, corrupters of Southern womanhood, [skunks] who steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms” and a host of other, equally colorful foes. In a year where just 47 Mississippi voters cast a ballot for a communist candidate, Bilbo railed against a looming communist takeover of the state — and offered himself up as the solution to this red onslaught.

    Bilbo was also a virulent racist. “I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the n[*]ggers away from the polls,” Bilbo proclaimed during his successful reelection campaign in 1946. He was a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, telling Meet the Press that same year that “[n]o man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux.” During a filibuster of an anti-lynching bill, Bilbo claimed that the bill

    “will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.”

    For Senator Bilbo, however, racism was more that just an ideology, it was a sincerely held religious belief. In a book entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Bilbo wrote that “[p]urity of race is a gift of God . . . . And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” Allowing “the blood of the races [to] mix,” according to Bilbo, was a direct attack on the “Divine plan of God.” There “is every reason to believe that miscengenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God.”

    Bilbo was one of the South’s most colorful racists, but he was hardly alone in his beliefs. As early as 1867, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld segregated railway cars on the grounds that “[t]he natural law which forbids [racial intermarriage] and that social amalgamation which leads to a corruption of races, is as clearly divine as that which imparted to [the races] different natures.” This same rationale was later adopted by state supreme courts in Alabama, Indiana and Virginia to justify bans on interracial marriage, and by justices in Kentucky to support residential segregation and segregated colleges.

    In 1901, Georgia Gov. Allen Candler defended unequal public schooling for African Americans on the grounds that “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.” After the Supreme Court ordered public schools integrated in Brown v. Board of Education, many segregationists cited their own faith as justification for official racism. Ross Barnett won Mississippi’s governorship in a landslide in 1960 after claiming that “the good Lord was the original segregationist.” Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia relied on passages from Genesis, Leviticus and Matthew when he spoke out against the civil rights law banning employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters on the Senate floor.

    Read more:
    http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/02/26/3333161/religious-liberty-racist-anti-gay/

  12. Posted February 28, 2014 at 4:12 am | Permalink

    Interesting and likely influential.

    Related, I have noticed that “Christian” might now being used as a code word for “white” if the ads for “Christian Singles” are any indication.

  13. Posted March 7, 2014 at 5:39 am | Permalink

    I’ve never been satisfied with the terms “homophobe” and “homophobia”, as they imply fear, when dislike or hate (of the action, if not the actor) would usually be closer to the case. I think “homomisic” and “homomisia” are better terms here.

  14. anonymous
    Posted March 7, 2014 at 9:42 am | Permalink

    I think it’s fear of contamination. These people are so insecure in their sexuality that they worry that proximity to homosexuality will bring out tendencies in them and members if their families. There’s no other explanation. Jesus never said a damned thing about homosexuality.

  15. Elliott
    Posted March 12, 2014 at 1:15 pm | Permalink

    Well, the veto cost Jan Brewer her political career. She just announced that she will not run for reelection.

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