Posted on 09/01/2013 11:53:17 AM PDT by narses
PORTLAND – A Portland bar owner has been ordered to pay about $400,000 to a group of transgendered people he banned from his establishment last year.
The Bureau of Labor and Industries civil rights division imposed the penalty against Chris Penner, owner of the Twilight Room Annex, the Oregonian reported Friday.
Eleven people will share in the penalty, with amounts ranging from $20,000 to $50,000.
It’s the first penalty imposed under the 2007 Oregon Equality Act, which protects the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Oregonians in employment, housing and public places. Some other complaints ended in settlements.
The bureau’s civil rights division began investigating the bar formerly known as The P Club last year after Penner left a voice message for one of the T-Girls, a social group for transgendered people that went to the bar on Friday nights.
According to the complaint filed with the bureau, the message said: “People think that a.) We’re a tranny bar, or b.) We’re a gay bar. We are neither. People are not coming in because they just don’t want to be here on a Friday night now.”
The complaint listed 11 aggrieved persons, 10 of whom present as women. Their legal names are not given.
The T-Girls said they were devastated and humiliated. They said they went to the bar every Friday for two years because they felt safe there – the bartender treated them well, and bouncers walked them to their cars as they left.
“The individuals had found a place at the P Club where they found they could share their lives, their stories,” Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian said. “When that is stripped away, that is an indignity that is severe.”
Penner denied last year that he is biased but said other customers complained that the T-Girls left the stall doors open and seats up in the women’s restrooms and business had dropped.
Penner’s lawyer, Jonathan Radmacher, said his client was not surprised by the decision: Avakian brought the complaint, and his deputy affirmed it.
“The writing was on the wall,” Radmacher said, “but we went through the process because we thought it was important that the facts came out.”
Although the First Amendment does not explicitly mention freedom of association, the Supreme Court ruled, in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama (1958),[208] that this freedom was protected by the Amendment and that privacy of membership was an essential part of this freedom.[209] The U.S. Supreme Could decided in Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984) that “implicit in the right to engage in activities protected by the First Amendment” is “a corresponding right to associate with others in pursuit of a wide variety of political, social, economic, educational, religious, and cultural ends.”[210] In Roberts the Court held that associations may not exclude people for reasons unrelated to the group’s expression, such as gender.[211]
However, in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston (1995),[212] the Court ruled that a group may exclude people from membership if their presence would affect the group’s ability to advocate a particular point of view.[213] Likewise, in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000),[214] the Court ruled that a New Jersey law, which forced the Boy Scouts of America to admit an openly gay member, to be an unconstitutional abridgment of the Boy Scouts’ right to free association.[215] -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
For what it’s worth, check out the street view on Google Maps for P Club Bar & Grill (it’s just a neighborhood sports bar; prior businesses had P in the name and it probably made sense to the new owners) and then read the comments here @ Yelp
http://www.yelp.com/biz/p-club-bar-and-grill-portland
There’s a reason for all the derogatory nicknames for Portland; unfortunately good businesses have to suffer as a result of it being true.
Just a sample comment at Yelp from a year ago:
“P-Club is a perfectly good working person’s bar in a working person’s neighborhood. Service is good, food is simple bar fare, good and cheap. I don’t drink so not sure what alcohol costs there. Atmosphere is what it is... Although the place is fully equipped with tons of windscreens with variety, pool tables, shuffleboard, pinball, lottery machines and a distant dance floor with 80’s & 90’s music on tap. Seems as if there is a huge stink about discrimination against the Rose City T-Girls Group (a Yahoo based group of mostly closeted crossdressers) that frequented the P-Club every Friday night. The owner claimed the group hurt Friday night business and were asked not to come back. Completely understandable because by the end of a typical Friday night the group usually became a loud, obnoxious circus that dominated the pool table area. The closeted crossdresser leader of the group aka “Cassandra” was the main offender of these behaviors, along with clogging the girl’s bathroom toilet with a stinking dump on many a nights. That always seemed to go over real well with the regular patrons in a “shared” girl’s bathroom... For the most part cheap draft beer was consumed in copious amounts by the group along with a few plates of nachos and ribs. Not a big money maker for the bar. As far as the the P-Club being T-Girl friendly? From my many, many Friday night P-Club experiences as an active and “out” crossdresser, I would say NO. Not because of the staff & management for they were they very T-Girl friendly but because its just a very unfitting bar in an unfitting neighborhood to be holding a T-Girl venue. This whole discrimination stink against the P-Club is complete bunk. If the Rose City T-Girls Group is so profitable for a bar or club then what establishment is “blessed” with the group’s Friday night business now?”
I hope the bar just closes and the guy declares bankruptcy....these creeps just wanted some money....period...
And, they will go from bar to bar to whatever business to get money and spread their deviance~
We passed laws in the 60s that made it a crime NOT to serve people if they were black. Some people opposed that idea, but it has a huge level of support.
Oregon passed a law pretty much identical, only specifying GLBT. If we can pass a law requiring a bar to serve blacks, Oregon can pass a law requiring a bar to serve men who are wearing dresses, or women wearing pants.
And if the bar owner doesn’t like it, he can either spend his money getting people elected who won’t pass these laws, or he can spend his money to move to a state where they have not passed these laws.
But in the end, a place that does nothing more for customers than serve them should expect they can’t tell some people they won’t serve them. This is different than a “for-hire” service where a person contracts with you — and you should be allowed to choose your clientelle.
I think it was a shame we couldn’t solve the problem of blacks being served by convincing people to stop being racist, rather than forcing them by law to stop being racist. But that’s where we are.
If individuals are doing things that cost the bar money or patrons, they should be able to be dealt with as individuals based on what they are doing, rather than what they are. “After repeated requests, your group continues to act in an uncivil manner in our restrooms, so I regret that I will have to ask you to no longer frequent my establishment, for a period of 3 months. After that time, I will consider allowing you back, so long as you are willing to comport yourselves in an appropriate manner while using my establishment.”
I’m surprised that anti-gay folks haven’t gotten the idea to start frequenting gay bars and doing things that make the gay patrons uncomfortable, in the hopes of being thrown out and suing.
Now I'm not dumb but I can't understand
How she talks like a woman and walks like a man.
“But in the end, a place that does nothing more for customers than serve them should expect they can’t tell some people they won’t serve them.”
Buncombe.
How were these freaks harmed to the tune of $400,000??
Sexual perversion is the mark of the beast, don’t support it and they will make you starve
He could have changed the name to the "Straight Stuff Bar & Grill" or whatever
The bar owner should have said he is Muhammidan and he is just following the Quran. That would have put the bureaucrats in a position of picking which special rights group wins.
I think God is saying, time to play gospel offense again. Defense is failing big time, however God really intended defense to have a church scope, not a society scope. America and Renaissance Europe were fortunate to have a gospel culture founding, thus giving something larger to actually play defense around. But the founding vision of the church is not to help keep society nice. It is to blaze with the gospel in the middle of a horrible libertine world to which no Christian look is cast for help.
And frankly, low-church preachers and Wascally Evangelicals are the people to do it while the rest of y’all pray like mad for their ministry.
These sex fiends aren’t nearly as happy or gladsome as they would let on. They are miserable. The gospel is tailor made for them. Who has the moxie to burrow past the devil’s lies to their need?
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