As reported by AFN earlier this month, the Family Foundation of Virginia wanted to have a special event with supporters at a restaurant in the Richmond area. The restaurant, Metzger Bar & Butchery, initially agreed to the event and booked a reservation for the Foundation – but that changed after the owner told Foundation president Victoria Cobb that a team member looked into the organization and refused to serve the Foundation.
"Although it would be easy for our guests and I to take great offense and to actually move forward with litigation, we feel like the very faith that they were afraid of is the faith that is convincing us that, at this point, the best thing to do is simply turn the other cheek," she explains.
In a statement, the restaurant had called 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.
Cobb told American Family Radio that her organization has made its case in the public square and in the media that Metzger shouldn't have done what it did.
"And at this point we feel like it's best to move on to where there has been greater injury and greater harm with many of the clients that we have at our law center [who have] actually lost jobs and things of great worth over religious discrimination," says Cobb. "We want to spend our energy there for those clients."
The management of the restaurant cancelled the Foundation's reservation an hour and a half before the event was to occur, suggesting that Cobb's group presented a security threat to its staff. The Foundation subsequently took their event elsewhere.
