Games People Play

Night or day, you just can't stop it.  So, how have you guys been doing?  Things have been fine here. The football season ended, and I just could not pick back up listening to Dana, and I feel better for it.  Alas, I had the radio station on in my car when I went to lunch today, and this spewed out:

Just when I thought I had gotten out, they suck me right back in. There is so much wrong with this. The story is about a transgender man who went to an all male barber shop to get a haircut. He was refused because they do not do women's hair, and they do not even let women into the shop. They are, "too much of a distraction".

What follows from Dana, Kane and a caller are a bunch of false equivalencies. It all boils down to the right to refuse service. To Dana, Kane, and a caller, you should be able to run the business as you see fit. Want to refuse service to someone, have at it. There are other barber shops, and besides, this is your hair, you should do what is right to get it right. To Dana, for this woman, that involves going to a great clips.

That argument falls flat on its face, because this is not about forcing someone to cut your hair. It is about ending discrimination. Judging by her current, short cropped haircut, she has someone that has been cutting her hair. If any discriminated class of people, whether black, white, male, female or gay didn't get protection thanks to the courts, we might see a whole lot more bigotry than this,

They made a comparison about taking your Dodge to a Honda dealer. I have personal experience  with this, and would it blow your mind to know I have seen Mitsubishis serviced at Buick dealers, Hondas at Chevy dealers, and even Dodges at the Honda dealer, even when there was a Dodge dealer just next door. Wanna know why? Because the guy who purchases a new Buick will get it serviced at the Buick dealer, and will probably buy an older car for their child, but still get it serviced at the Buick dealer because he likes it there, he knows the people. And the Buick dealer will gladly service the older Mitsubishi because it is good business.


And no, if a manager at a Walmart "doesn't like you" he cannot tell you to leave. That is, unless he tells everyone he does not like to leave, or he has another reason, like he does not like you because you shoplifted, or you were fired for bad performance. As long as he is uniform on his denial, and he is not denying due to discrimination, then he does have a right to refuse service.

Because when you go through the process of opening a business, and you offer a public service, you cannot just deny service to someone because you do not like them. If everybody were allowed to do that, we may as well start segregating water fountains. Because you certainly could hear similar arguments in the 60s that Dana espoused int he video above.

Dana falsely states this is about protected classes of people by saying not everybody can be a protected class because if that was true, then nobody could be one. But this is not bout protected classes, because everybody in California is protected against discrimination.

At the end, Dana starts talking about how Helen Keller was a bigot. She is flummoxed that someone who could not see could have a racist heart. Let us forget for a second that Keller was the daughter of a man who used to own slaves. Nothing I have read says she was a bigot, and quite to the contrary, she fought bigotry. She was unto herself a protected class waiting to happen. She is part of the reason every restaurant must have a braille menu. The only crime Keller may have with people in Dana's crowd is that she was a socialist. Edison? Well yeah, he was a jerk, just ask Tesla.

This is the kind of lowest common denominator politics that has driven me away from the show. There are those who are drawn to it, much the same way they are driven to Trump. They do not care if it is true, as long as it is what they want to hear. It is the red meat for their radio ear. They can keep it. At least until the next time I go out for lunch and forget to turn the channel.