Quote:
Originally Posted by Onkel Neal
Singers and celebrities were OK with declining try to serve Trump at his inauguration
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The big difference there was not a quid pro quo (money or other form of payment for goods or services), it was merely a case of the singers and celebrities not wanting to be associated with the politics of Trump. It is interesting you used the word "serve"; they were invited and decided to decline the invitation; there was no mandate involved and they were free to refuse; if Trump took umbrage, the problem was his, not theirs...
I am of two minds about the bakery issue; while I respect the concept, as the phrase goes, of "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone", there are times when the exercise of any right ends when it impinges on the rights of others; there is no such thing as an 'absolute right'; however, it is true activists do deliberately go out of their way to create situations in order to feed their own agendas. This works both ways: back in the early 80s, I was at a newsstand/bookstore in West Hollywood, an area with a very large gay population; there was suddenly a loud commotion involving a couple of gay men and a family consisting of a man, a woman and two very young children. Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies were right on the scene. The man with the children began to loudly and aggressively accuse the two gay guys of making sexual advances to the two small children, which was denied by the gay guys. I knew they had not made any such actions because I had been watching them, waiting for them to move because they were blocking my access to the guitar magazine section. I went up to one of the deputies and offered my testimony of what actually had happened; with a somewhat weary manner he told me it probably wouldn't be necessary; it seems the 'family' were part of some extreme evangelical Christian sect and had been pulling the same stunts for some time; in fact, the LEOs were pretty much fed up with them and had been mulling over whether to file charges of making false police reports against the 'activists'. As said, it cuts both ways...
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