This story is confusing me.

We'll it's a shame that they had to sell the B&B as it was clearly something they were very invested in but the fact they wouldn't serve a gay couple is disgusting. That being said I think that death threats may be a little bit too much.

 

I honestly don't feel sorry for them one bit.
Their backwards ways were destined to fail.
Forcing your beliefs onto BUSINESS customers is an absolute no-go.

No, no sympathy from me.

 

in a way I do feel for them loosing the business.But I also think there christian beliefs stink being like that cost them allot of money in court fees .

 

I'm not up on the political leanings of The Daily Mail, but got a strong sense of what in the US we would call conservative bias in the way the article is written. Or maybe British news articles are just written differently. Thoughts from any British people here?

I'd also note that while the couple claims all sorts of things happened to them, they didn't seem to bother taking pictures or calling the police or otherwise documenting the alleged events. At least the article doesn't mention it. In addition, I have to wonder about how, if their 'heterosexual married couples only' policy has been so longstanding, that one of the owners could take a reservation from someone asking for a room AND FORGET TO CONFIRM THEIR STATUS. One wonders what they would have done if a straight unmarried couple had turned up.

Finally, there are the negative reviews about the place mentioned at the end, which seem to have nothing to do with orientation. We've stayed in a B&B a couple times and talked with the owner. My partner also has a friend who did the B&B thing for a bit. It's a tough business and a lot of them fail or exhaust their owners or both. And that's before you start placing artificial limits on your customer base.

I would very much want to see how business was doing before this particular event happened. Because based on what I'm reading, I'm thinking it's just as likely they were failing anyway and are using 'the gays' as an excuse or scapegoat.

The whole 'we're so religiously persecuted because we can't legally persecute others we don't like' whine tends to make me start thinking of lions and inviting the whiners to star in an object demonstration of what REAL religious persecution looks like.

Anyway,

Todd

 

reap what you sow etc

 

You have the right to have any view that you want and say what you want about gay people. How ever discrimination is illegal. If it wasn't then there would be segregation. With white only hotels or straight only toilets etc..

 

I mean, they lost business and acted horridly by refusing service to a gay couple. Maybe this is a time where "karma is biotch" is appropriate. However, I do think that death threats seem a little bit draconian and they could have toned it down a little.

 

They broke the law (Equality Act 2010).

If you decide to open up your home to paying guests and make the offer of Bed and Breakfast, you cannot, under the terms of the Equality Act refuse service to people with protected characteristics - that includes LGBT people.

I will not comment on alleged death threats as I didn't read the Mail article. It's not a newspaper I will entertain, due to the heavy conservative bias and hyperbole in its reporting.

 

I did read the article, and all it has is that the owners claimed that they received death threats - again, no indications that police were notified, no recordings, or letters, or whatever it is that supposedly delivered the alleged threat.

Maybe they did indeed receive such threats from somebody (who may or may not have been LGBT). Or maybe they are just saying they did.

Todd

 

The Daily Mail is a rag. I wouldn't believe that the couple or the newspaper are reporting what happened objectively or even truly. The Daily Mail has a disgusting history of lies, scaremongering, and even publishing entirely fabricated stories to damage political opponents (even toppling a government once on a lie). Without clear evidence, without even having anything which could be vaguely backed up, they show another example of their shoddy practices.

Back to the story. Death threats are totally unacceptable, but I'm going to go with the assumption that they were untrue or at least exaggerated, if only because of the newspaper.

They broke the law, and a just law at that. Morally, what they did was repugnant, but they conducted business under the jurisdiction of the law which they refused to obey. Breaking the conditions of your business' existence isn't justified.

 

You hit the nail on the head, very deep conservative bias with the Daily Mail (or The Daily Heil as I've often heard it referred to). The tone of their articles is quite different to those of any respectable fact-based publications here in the UK, although some other tabloids do veer towards the direction of bigotry. I try to avoid reading any DM articles because as someone who is both gay and disabled reading anything they've published and the subsequent comments from their idiot readership are enough to get my blood boiling (their views on the sick and disabled are somewhere in the area of 'they're all lying thieving fakers who want to get rich off welfare benefits and should magically become healthy or be left to starve to death'.)

They also caused a bit of a shit storm a few years back over a piece written by columnist Jan Moir after the tragic death of the young gay singer Stephen Gately before his funeral had even taken place, in which she openly rejected the autopsy findings that he had died of natural causes (a previously undiagnosed genetic heart condition) and implied that his death was somehow the result of his 'sleazy' lifestyle and also criticized gay marriage as a 'happy-ever-after myth', implied that Stephen's own bereaved mother was lying and threw in a mention of another gay man who had recently died to back up her mad theory. The article caused a lot of controversy but the DM were entirely unconcerned with the complaints.

On the subject of the story; as Linco pointed out if you open up your home as a business you have to abide by the laws of the Equality Act. If the B+B owners were unwilling to obey the law they should not have been running a business.

 

I am torn because it is their own home and their business. I can see both sides on this one.

 

If the customers in question had been denied service because they were non-white, or Jewish, or the like, instead of LGBT would this still be an issue?

I ask, not to attack you, but because in many discussions of these sorts of cases (in the world in general) there often seems to be some unspoken dividing line between LGBT people and every other group that has been/is discriminated against. I wonder why that is.

More generally, no one put a gun to their heads and forced them to turn their home into a business. Who you associate with in your home is pretty much your business. But when businesses start doing it you start getting things like segregation and 'separate but equal' and 'no coloreds allowed' signs in windows - which historically hasn't turned out well. So laws have been enacted to not allow that kind of thing. If you want to operate a business, you need to abide by the law. Where you choose to locate the business in question isn't really relevant, that I can see.

Or am I missing something?

Todd

 

I have no sympathy for people who do things like that. You're right they have every right to think stupid things in their personal life. But publicly available services like a bed and breakfast are not their personal life. They shouldn't be allowed to kick out gay people for the same reason they shouldn't be allowed to kick out Jewish and asian people.