Could this be the dumbest controversy ever? "Biden under fire for claiming people are 'thrown out of a restaurant for being gay'"

A great example of the complex stupefaction on both sides of the divide (which is itself our gravest problem)

“When a person can get married in the morning and thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon, this is still wrong.”

Thus spake “Joe Biden” on December 13, in a speech marking the passage, with bipartisan support, of the Respect for Marriage Act, affirming the validity of same-sex and inter-racial unions in America. Although that quotation is over five months old, it sparked an online hoo-ha that (for whatever reason) was reported only a few weeks ago, so that it’s fresh enough to justify my digging into it, because of its exemplary stupidity—i.e., stupidity that’s going to get us killed, unless enough of us wise up ASAP.

This stupidity is (literally) raging “on both sides,” but let’s start with what “Joe Biden” said, or what his minders had him say: “When a person can get married in the morning and thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon, this is still wrong.” First of all, that line is notable, at least to me, for its comic incoherence. Let’s concede that “Biden” meant (and maybe even understood) that that hypothetical “person” is a gay person, who had married his/her soulmate “in the morning,” and, that afternoon, got “thrown out of a restaurant for being gay.”

While that is surely what “Joe Biden” (or whoever) meant, what he said is that it’s “wrong” for “a person”—any person—to get married in the morning (to anyone, straight or gay), and then get “thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon.” Certainly it would be “wrong” if, say, a straight person, newly married, should be “thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon,” especially since s/he’s not gay but straight, regardless of the time of day. On the other hand, it also would be wrong to bounce someone from a restaurant, or otherwise mistreat him/her, “for being gay in the afternoon.” (Since when is that a crime? What about “being gay” at night? And does the Respect for Marriage Act declare it legal to “be gay in the afternoon”?)

Of course, I’m kidding here, since “Biden” (or whoever) surely did not mean that said “person” isn’t gay, or that his/her problem, in that nasty restaurant, is “being gay in the afternoon.” I’m just having fun with that bad sentence (since God knows we could always use some fun). But even if we overlook its mangled syntax, its point is still unclear: “When a person can get married in the morning and thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon, this is still wrong.” What did “Biden” (or whoever) mean by “still wrong”? Why not just say it’s wrong for restaurants to discriminate against gay diners? Again, I’m only funning here, since “Biden” clearly meant to say that, even though gay Americans have now been freed to marry whom they choose, they’re still subject to social prejudice, and that, of course, is wrong.

On the other hand, it’s also wrong—and, let’s face it, stupid—to lament, as “Biden” did, that restaurants in the United States are throwing people out of restaurants for “being gay,” as restaurants down South, not all that long ago, refused to serve Americans for “being black.” That sort of thing may happen in, say, Uganda, or the UAE (and if it does, or ever has, please let me know), but does it happen here? If so, please comment accordingly. Meanwhile, it’s more than likely that the speechwriter(s) who pounded out that presidential speech had come across this headline from NBC News, January 25, 2021:

I’ve put “headline” in italics, because nothing in the article confirms that shocking allegation. Here’s what actually did happen, according to NBC’s Cynthia Silva:

A gay New York City couple say they were harassed and asked to leave a restaurant this month because of their sexuality.

Nelson Ayala and Jamel Brown Jr., who live in the Bronx, say the incident happened at the nearby Puerto Rican restaurant La Isla Cuchifrito. They say a woman who worked behind the counter made homophobic remarks after they had ordered.

In a video taken by Ayala and shared with NBC News, the employee can be heard saying “hombre, mujer” repeatedly, which translates into “man, woman.” She then says, in a mix of English and Spanish, “Everything correct my family: hombre, mujer, nino y nina,” adding the Spanish words for boy and girl. In a separate video shot by Ayala, the woman can be heard repeatedly apologizing.

The restaurant has since fired the employee, and Boyd Cole, a relative of the owner, said, “In no way do they condone the comments made by their former employee.”

Ayala, however, said that he and Brown don’t accept the apology.

“They apologized, and they offered us a meal, but this is not something that should just go away,” he said.

Because the incident happened in New York City, the men have legal recourse.

“New York state law and New York City law prohibit sexual orientation discrimination in public accommodations such as restaurants,” Richard Saenz, an attorney at the LGBTQ civil rights group Lambda Legal, told NBC News. “In NYC, if you experience discrimination, you have a right to file a complaint with the NYC Commission on Human Rights.”

Ayala and Brown said they plan to file such a complaint.

The article goes on to note that, unlike New York, 19 states—including North Carolina—offer no legal recourse to gay people faced with discrimination. (Therefore, “advocates are hopeful the Biden administration will pass additional nondiscrimination protections.”) The piece ends on this feisty (some might call it threatening) note:

As for Ayala and Brown, they said there have been rallies with LGBTQ activists outside La Isla Cuchifrito, and they hope the protests will encourage businesses owners and managers to provide better training for employees and let the community know that if someone else is discriminated against, “this will be the outcome.”

“We will all come together as one, and will let people hear our voices,” Ayala said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/gay-couple-says-nyc-restaurant-kicked-them-out-because-their-n1255436

Contrary to NBC’s headline, then, and Silva’s lede, that gay couple were not “kicked out” of the restaurant, nor is it quite true that they were “asked to leave”—a phrase implying that management had told them to get out. It was a lowly employee “behind the counter” (La Isola Cuchifrito is a fast-food spot, like Chipotle) who, having seen the two men holding hands (a detail reported by Metro UK), flipped out on them, incoherently affirming the traditional division of the sexes, as well as her own family’s propriety in that regard, and (according to the couple, although it evidently isn’t in their video) telling them to leave. Management then intervened, offering profuse apologies, as well as a free meal, and evidently coming down on the offending worker like a ton of bricks, since she too now apologized “repeatedly.” She was then “kicked out” by the restaurant, for good, and understandably, since restaurant workers can’t treat customers that way.

Thus both NBC News’ headline, and the presidential riff that it inspired, solicited our indignation with a tale of bigotry against the “LGBTQ community”—a tale and nothing more, since, as the story should make clear to anyone who bothers reading it, those two gay men were not the victims of a homophobic restaurant (in New York City!), but, finally, the aggressors. No doubt it was a shock to have their sexuality impugned like that; but they got instant satisfaction, as the restaurant apologized, offering them a meal for free, and fired that employee (although she too apologized, “repeatedly”). Thus she was surely hurt more badly by her outburst than the two men she assailed, as she—and her family—now lost her meager income as an unskilled worker, with little certainty that, with her poor English, she could easily find another job (especially without a reference letter from the restaurant that let her go).

Yet all of that—the restaurant’s apology, their offer of a complimentary meal, their termination of the errant worker, and her (terrified?) apologies—was not enough to salve the two men’s outraged “pride”: “This is not something that should just go away.” The two were going to file a complaint with the city’s Commission on Human Rights, and had already arranged “rallies with LGBTQ activists outside La Isola Cuchifrito.” The purpose of those rallies? “They hope the protests will encourage businesses’ owners and managers to provide better training for employees and let the community know that if someone else is discriminated against, ‘this will be the outcome.’” “We will all come together as one, and will let people hear our voices,” said Nelson Ayala.

That would be an apt response if he and Jamel Brown had been “kicked out” of that restaurant “because of their sexuality”; but since they weren’t, their militancy seems a tad extreme—or, at least, extremely narcissistic, and also more than likely to intensify the homophobic feeling whose expression caused that mini-furor in the first place. While agitating for “better training [of] employees,” to make them more “sensitive” toward gay patrons, the two have surely made that woman, and her family, detest gay people even more, by answering her self-righteous fury with their own, and beating her to ribbons at that demagogic game—a self-defeating tactic now used endlessly and everywhere by others “fighting hate” by merely bellowing against it, whether it’s racism, misogyny, anti-semitism or transphobia (real or imagined).

Now, with that point in mind, let’s move on from that battle to the one that broke out over Biden’s ludicrous insinuation (and that was belatedly reported in mid-April): “Biden Under Fire for Claiming People Are "Thrown Out of a Restaurant for Being Gay," a piece by someone called “A Dime Saved,” and carried, for a moment, by (among others) Microsoft. Biden’s “comments have led to questions and criticism on social media,” the piece begins, then reproduces a few angry comments, under the heading “Twitter Reacts.”

As those tweets variously hammer the absurdity of Biden’s line (that gay Americans are getting booted out of restaurants), they all make sense, and plenty more of it than Biden (or whoever) did; but they also make some fundamental errors. First of all, those tweeters make the big mistake of thinking (and here I am not kidding) that “Joe Biden” is a person, and that that speech was his. “Not sure where you been eating, Joe,” tweeted Keith Ainsworth. “Seriously,” tweeted Gerry Callahan, “Joe Biden thinks made-up gay people getting thrown out of pretend restaurants is a bigger problem than a thousand illegal aliens crossing the Southern border in one day.” “Why does Joe Biden want you to believe that gay people are being tossed out of restaurants in America?” tweeted Adam Ford. “Because he thinks you’re an idiot and he trusts you’re a brainwashed ideologue.”

As bilious as they are, those tweets are highly flattering to the presidential entity, by ascribing to it thoughts and motives that “Joe Biden” clearly doesn’t have—since he evidently has no thoughts or motives, and hasn’t for some time; Trump nailed it (as he often does when picking off his adversaries) back in July of 2020, when he told Chris Wallace, who had asked him if he considered Biden “senile,” that the latter “doesn’t even know he’s alive.” That’s even truer now than it was then; and yet both sides continue, jointly, to maintain the fiction that the president is really there—the Democrats because “Joe Biden” is their anti-Trump, and Trump’s fans because they need a very, very Bad Guy (as Trump would say) to rage against. The claim that Biden’s there, and in command, is even stupider than “his” idea (lifted, stupidly, from NBC News) about the sad plight of gay diners in America, since he’s the one empowered to make the Big Decision if the US should (allegedly) come under nuclear attack, and nothing could be stupider than that.

https://twitter.com/TimRunsHisMouth/status/1663259183922200589

Speaking of grotesque Cold War scenarios, let’s recall that, back when Russia was still Soviet, and Biden knew he was alive, he was a tough-talking liberal hawk, sent to Moscow, under Carter and then Reagan, to negotiate arms control agreements. (On his first trip there in 1979, he briefly met with Leonid Brezhnev—or so he often said, and wrote in his memoirs, although there’s no record of that meeting anywhere, and no one else remembers it.) In those talks, as noted by the Guardian, “Biden cultivated a pugnacious style [that] became his hallmark,” and that led the Soviets to see him as a no-nonsense guy. (They were also struck, in 1988, by his request that his son Hunter, who had tagged along with him to Moscow, be allowed to sit in on the meeting.) Whatever diplomatic skills he may have shown back then had vanished by the time he first met Putin in 2011, if his account is true. “Mr. Prime Minister,” he said (or so he often said he said), “I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul” (a callback to George W. Bush’s having said, soon after 9/11, that he’d looked into Putin’s eyes, and “saw his soul”).

Whether true or not, that story surely thrilled the warlike circle Biden moved in years ago, along with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, under the sway of anti-Russian zealot Zbigniew Brzezinski, who saw Putin as another Stalin (and whom Biden, when still sentient, idolized). This brings us to the very dumbest strain of anti-Biden diatribe, asserting that “Joe Biden” is a communist. “Biden saying gay people are getting thrown out of restaurants proves a point I’ve made many times: You cannot negotiate or reason with the communist because the simple truth is most of them live entirely in a world of make believe. You can’t leave reality to work with someone.”

Thus Jesse Kelly, TV/radio provocateur and author of The Anticommunist Manifesto (forthcoming), weighed in on the imaginary persecution of gay diners in America, by pounding on a retro notion that’s unfortunately epidemic on the right. While the question of Marxism, and its (indirect) relationship to what we’re all now going through, is far too complex to be treated adequately here, Kelly’s take on Biden is preposterous on its face. “Biden saying gay people are getting thrown out of restaurants” proves that he’s a communist? All it “proves” is that he read that line out loud. Khrushchev, Deng Xiaoping and Castro “live[d] entirely in a world of make believe,” so no one could negotiate with them? History says otherwise, and abundantly enough to indicate that Jesse Kelly “live[s] entirely in a world of make believe”—reminding us that anticommunism, at its fiercest, is itself an ideology as rigid and aggressive as the one it’s always fighting. In any case, just as “Joe Biden” is, today, incapable of even spelling “ideology,” much less serving one, we now know that, back when he had all his marbles, his sole interest was himself, and his enrichment, “by any means necessary.” However much he’s soaked up from the CCP (among other powers worldwide), what such obscene bribes “prove” is not that he’s a communist (pace Marjorie Taylor Greene), but that he’s easily the greediest, most predatory sleaze that ever fouled the Oval Office (and that is saying something).

But let’s now step away from Jesse Kelly’s anticommunist fixation, and the right’s mistaken view of “Biden,” and the idiotic notion, voiced (unconsciously) by “Biden,” that gay people in America are getting bounced from restaurants; and, of course, let’s move still further from the story of what really happened at La Isola Cuchifrito, where a worker’s homophobic fit enabled its two targets to attack the restaurant, and generate a moment of invidious publicity. Let’s move away from all those stupid stories, and draw the moral that they variously share, in hopes that it might help us be less stupid with each other overall.

Today we are at war—a global war, waged, by its mighty authors, with unprecedented ingenuity and ruthlessness against the rest of us; and yet too few of us are even conscious of it. Unlike the grand extermination drives of the last century, the one ongoing now throughout the world is still imperceptible to millions in its very midst, for two reasons. First of all, this ultimate world war has been concealed from countless of its victims by its successful guise as a humanitarian venture, meant not, of course, to kill us but to keep us “safe”—which we can’t be unless we all “comply.” That “choice” was posed endlessly and inescapably throughout the media worldwide, first concerning masks (yours wouldn’t work if everybody wasn’t wearing them), and then the “vaccination” (your shot would not protect you unless everybody else got “vaccinated,” too). Pushed by constant reference to “the science,” although they had no scientific basis whatsoever (on the contrary), those propaganda myths divided all humanity into the Good ones who “complied,” and the Bad ones who refused.

And that’s the second major reason why this war is still invisible, especially to those it’s hurt the most: i.e., the obedient majority, who, all too often, can’t even conceive that they’ve been targeted, because they’re just too good for that (and the authorities are, too), while anyone who tells them otherwise is, a priori, bad (like Trump). “Our free press” has been vigorously pushing such division, and not just since the COVID crisis started, as issue after issue has, for years, been not impartially reported, but always uniformly melodramatized, to vilify all those with different views. Thus, by 2020, “our free press” was already thus divisively reporting climate change, gun violence, “white supremacy,” “transphobia”—and, above all, Trump, whose placement in the White House, after having been strategically misrepresented as a second Hitler, was essential to the strategy, which in itself, of course, is nothing new.

It’s what the Romans called “divide and conquer” (divide et impera)—a strategy essential to the maintenance of all empires; and one now being used again, though on a larger scale than ever, in furtherance of the planetary hell envisioned by the globalist elite. To that end, their state lackeys, corporate instruments and army of sock-puppets in the media have done their damnedest to divide the people even more, to multiply and deepen such divisions, and make them still more poisonous. The purpose of such mischief is, of course, to keep us all at one another’s throats, so that we don’t consider—can’t imagine—making common cause against the caste whose power and wealth depend on keeping us all bitterly apart from one another, until they’ve finally killed enough of us to win. The only way that we can win is to resist the fatal tribal impulse that (let’s face it) variously throbs in all of us, so that enough of us can finally join together, and fight back, never mind those tribalists (whether “left” or right, or Red or Blue, or black or white, or straight or “LGBTQ”) who’d rather fight each other.