The Brownshirting of America

from Blue Bunny at tabletalk:

I witnessed a very scary event in California last weekend. A friend of mine owns a bar in a red town in a red county in the bluest of the blue states.

However, the whole motto of the town has always been live and let live.

One set of his regular customers is a group of e lesbian ladies. They like him becasue he's always been nice to him, and visa versa. They are very outspoken about their sexual orientation,and have been a positve fixture in the community since I was in high school 25 years ago.

Well, last Saturday night, this group of women came in the bar. They had a couple of drinks, some appetizers, and danced a couple of dances.

People started making loud, anti-homosexual comments worthy of anything Falwell has ever spouted, and then one old coot asked them to leave. It sort of frightened me and my date, and we started to get our jackets together to leave in case the place erupted into a bar fight.

My friend, the owner of the place, didn't do anything to stop this confrontation. Feeling challenged, these women left the bar, and the place cheered when they did.

When I left the bar, I confronted my friend - I said, what the hell was up with that?

He pretty much told me that things had changed, and people weren't putting up with what they felt was deviant behavior any more. Plus, it would have been dangerous to stop the crowd from making their comments. He told me he had tried that a couple of times, and he'd gotten hurt. He also has the place for sale because of the way things are.

I was stunned. While people may not have liked what you did or how you lived, no one ever made comments. The town has always had a huge meth & pot problem, too many unwanted children, and too much poverty. That's OK. It's American.

But if you are a middle-aged lesbian version of the Red Hat Society, active in the museum committee, the humane society, the library guild, and own half the businesses in town, you are deviant and need to get out of the local sports bar.

I hate that fucking town, and if my parents didn't live there, I would never ever set foot in it again.