The Family Foundation of Virginia reserved a private room at the Metzger Bar & Butchery in Richmond, Virginia for a dinner and meeting – but last week, an hour and a half before the scheduled time, Metzger management cancelled. As one of the Foundation's staffers found out, it wasn't an outbreak of COVID or anything like that; instead, it was an outbreak of intolerance, according to The Washington Stand.
Victoria Cobb, who heads the Family Foundation, tells AFN the restaurant issued a statement about why they took the action.
"They say that they do not agree with our views on the LGBT issues and the abortion issue," she shares. "And they … use this very flowery language about being tolerant and welcoming, and that they rarely refuse service. [But] they refuse service for people like us."
Specifically, the restaurant's statement calls out the Foundation as "a group of donors to a political organization that seeks to deprive women and LGBTQ+ persons of their basic human rights" in Virginia – a not-so-veiled reference to conservatives in the Republican Party who are pro-life and/or pro-traditional marriage. Metzger also suggested Cobb's group presented a security threat, saying it has "always refused service to anyone for making our staff uncomfortable or unsafe and this was the driving force behind our decision."
Cobb says it's disgraceful that a business has a political litmus test in order to get in the front door, so she felt the public ought to know.
"Metzger's has now isolated a wide base of customers who would rather go elsewhere than patron a bigoted restaurant," she argues. "People of faith should be concerned that we really have this kind of bigotry and intolerance against us; and that restaurant owners would set this kind of a standard in order to use their restaurant."
The Foundation took their event elsewhere, pointing out that it's a free market and people have many choices where to dine. But …
"Welcome to the double standard of the Left," Cobb wrote on her blog, "where some believe Jack Phillips (see below) must be forced to create a wedding cake as part of the celebration of a same-sex ceremony – but any business should be able to deny basic goods and services to those who hold biblical values around marriage."
Read related op-ed on The Washington Stand:
Woke Virginia restaurant dishes out intolerance, turns Christians away
Been there, done that, felt the hate
When the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case Monday involving a Christian web designer who is battling her liberal state of Colorado, a second Colorado-based business owner was recalling that the Left demands tolerance while acting nasty, rude, and vulgar.
Jack Phillips was operating a bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, in the suburbs of Denver when he became a legal target after refusing to design a wedding cake for two homosexual men. That legal conflict, which dates back to 2012, was resolved by the nation's highest court in a lopsided but narrow ruling announced in 2018.
While the high court was hearing the case of graphic designer Lori Smith, Phillips joined a rally outside the court to support her. He told The Daily Signal his bakery was flooded with everything from hateful emails to death threats by angry Leftists.
"It has affected our business quite a bit," he recalled. "We have given up a substantial part of our business to keep up this fight, but it's been encouraging all the way through to see the support that we've gotten."
Phillips is currently fighting a lawsuit filed by a transgender attorney, Autumn Scardina, who demanded Phillips design a custom birthday cake to celebrate his "transition" from male to female.
Scardina filed a civil suit against Phillips after the Colorado Civil Rights Commission dropped its own lawsuit against the business owner.
