Today In “Civil Rights Are Slavery”
By Shorter verbatim Tammy Bruce: “If we are able to coerce someone, via the threat of lawsuit and personal destruction, to provide a service, how is that not slavery? If we insist that you must violate your faith specifically in that slavish action, how is that not abject tyranny?”
Actually, Bruce seems to be doing Erick Erickson one better here: not only are requirements that public accommodations serve people on equal terms tantamount to slavery, she seems to be arguing that private boycotts are tantamount to slavery. I guess the idea is that when you’re already up to your waist in derp you might as well just go ahead and submerge yourself entirely.
I hope that the “basic civil rights protections are slavery” meme becomes a prominent feature of the Republican celebrations of the imaginary Martin Luther King who was totally a Reaganite before his time that recur every January. And it’s not that Republicans oppose civil rights; they just support the Jesse Helms version, and I’m sure if Helms were alive today he’d enthusiastically agree that civil rights statutes are like slavery and denying arbitrary individual exemptions to generally applicable laws is the essence of tyranny.