The Perfect Word
AlanInAustin came up with a helluva idea.
First, here’s a story you’ll chuckle at. In Florida, anti-gat cakes are apparently all the rage.
When a caller asked Sharon Haller to make a sheet cake with an anti-gay-marriage message, the Longwood baker thought it was a prank and hung up.
But a day later, Haller was still dealing with threats and other fallout after a video of the conversation was posted online.
“People said we should go kill ourselves,” said Haller, owner of Cut the Cake bakery. “They are being very threatening.”
And here is where Alan’s idea blooms. He emails me —
A party calls a bakery asking for a cake with an anti-gay message on it and the bakery refuses. An “evangelist” then goes nuts claiming the bakery is anti-Christian (this despite the fact that the caller didn’t reveal his religion and that the refusal was based on the message, not anything about the caller).
In honor of this occasion, I’m moved to create a new word:
fictim (n): a mashup of the words “faux” and “victim”, this describes a person desperate for attention who claims serious personal offense when not being given their own way regardless of how justifiable the reason.
Nailed it.
Thanks to AlaninAustin for the heads up and the new word.
You heard it first,right here at the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon!! Good one AlaninAustin.
1Oh yeah. Especially people who are being terribly oppressed by not being allowed to oppress others.
2Must really suck, when “No Sale” keeping coming up on the discrimination register.
AlaninAustin, thank you, I’d love a slice of equality cake!
3Did you hear that the pizza place that said they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding has a GoFundMe fund that is $842,000+. (It was finally closed at that point.) A bakery in Florida that was phoned and asked if they would make a cake with an anti-gay wedding message, said no thinking it was an April Fool’s joke, has been attacked in the same manner, but their GoFundMe has only raised $10,000+. This astounds me, first that these places were attacked as they were, then the bigoted ones get close to $1M for being goobers. I guess it shows you who has the money.
4Sigh.
It’s easier to get all riled up at these pseudo issues instead of the very real ones like possibility, or probability, of running out of water.
5Marge Wood, with no food to eat, GOP ‘thinking’ is that they won’t need water to wash it down. Plus, they have their balanced diet of Koch urine and excrement. Their idea of compromise is that we adapt to their diet.
6Ah. I knew there had to be a good reason. And a bunch of them still like to wave this at me like a red flag: “Oh, hotter climates will make it easier to grow more food.” I said, “Western Coal. I heard that thirty years ago from Western Coal.”
7The thing that always gets me about these cases is that it is just so easy for a business to decline by saying “So sorry, but we are already overbooked for that date/weekend/month.”
It actually happens all the time in the wedding vendor business. Vendors of all sorts get booked up.
But these “Christian” “people” aren’t happy just declining to do business with the hated queers, they need to push those homo faces in the mud and rub their noses in it and humiliate them.
I often wonder if these “Christians” are so me twig on the hominid evolutionary tree.
Homohatians.
Hopefully it will be a short lived experiment in evolutionary biology, as I don’t see any particular advantage to fear, hate and fantasy.
8Mark, I wish you were right about the Homo hatians being a shortlived evolutionary branch, but unfortunately the SOBs are outbreeding us. A chart with bio details on the many early 2008 candidates showed that none of the Dems had more than two kids, and none of the GOP had fewer than three. And the most rabid rightwingers are the most likely to breed like rats and have 8-10 kids. This does not mean that I think we should try to catch up, though. With 7+ billion overloading the place already, the less breeding the better.
9Abstinence only apparently isn’t practiced by those who preach it.
10In my day, this would have been called “throwing a tantrum” and the thrower would have been put in a corner.
11Unfortunately, these haters are not people of conscience, so have no qualms about pitching a fit to their own profit. “What does it profit their souls?” Sorry for the misquote
Grifters gonna grift and the internet has made it too easy to separate fools from their money.
Fictim. Perfect.
12@PKM, @Marge Wood, that food argument is a silly straw man. Those people are unaware of how much food we THROW AWAY, dumping it into the ocean rather than feed starving people the world over. Famine is a great tool for oppression after all: you rapidly become too weak to fight back. Of course, overindulgence has a similar effect: you become too lethargic to fight back, or even care. Then clever shysters and snake oil salesmen come along and con you into believing that this is good and necessary besides being beneficial. It is very beneficial to them! I’m pretty sure this is what has happened in other civilizations which have been replaced, and it will happen to ours too, probably sooner than we think!
13Fictim: my 1st thoughts were of George Will and his ilk. But then again, George should just stick with his first real love: baseball. That way he would actually be of help to humankind.
14Interesting mock trial on The Good Wife on this topic. The case was made that the Lord said nothing about homosexuality, but twice railed against divorce. The Bible thumper bakery owner had to admit that she didn’t turn down divorced people getting married to others, but did so only for gays. Hence, a violation of non-discrimination law based on sexual preference.
15For those who didn’t catch The Good Wife, the show made a clear distinction which we should all keep in mind:
1) Discrimination based on what services are offered.
2) Discrimination on who gets offered the services.
Mgmt of a business has the right to determine what services they will/not offer. A Jewish deli, for example, has the right to not serve non-kosher food to anyone who comes into the store. It matters not what religious affiliation, gender, race, etc. the would be purchaser has — the non-kosher product is equally denied to all.
(2) Mgmt of a business has a right to determine who they sell their services to, provided that selection does not violate laws regarding protected classes. A business could, for example, opt to not sell to left-handed people, individuals with beards, or folks with blue eyes. However, under federal law, they may NOT discriminate with respect to protected classes (gender, race, religion, etc.). To date, “sexual orientation” has not joined that list of federally protected classes — although some states/municipalities have extended protection to that group as well.
As much as anyone may it (or not), a business can legally refuse service based on sexual orientation if there’s no state/local law saying otherwise. We can influence this with our buying decisions (let the business know this!) as well as voting in favor or laws/politicians who champion that change.
The show mentioned one aspect that I’ve been wondering about but which they didn’t truly explore, namely what constitutes a sincerely held religious belief. In TGW, they only mentioned this in the context that the baker, contrary to the Bible, supported remarriages. I wish they had gone either further and explored some areas in Leviticus (eating of forbidden foods such as pork, shrimp, crab, lobster; wearing mixed clothes). The point could have been made that the baker routinely violates parts of the Bible for profit, even those very parts of the Bible which forbid homosexuality. The question of “How can you claim a sincerely held belief when you violate it on a regular, ongoing basis with no expression of remorse?” would have been a helluva scene.
16I would like to also propose “crucifiction” to denote the act of assuming an unwarranted mantle of martyrdom.
17Cruzaffliction. Rhymes with Crucifiction.
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