Right talk radio is turning its focus this week to Arizona’s controversial bill that would allow business owners to deny service to gay and lesbian customers, and Rush Limbaugh is leading with the charge that Gov. Jan Brewer is being “bullied” into vetoing the measure “in order to advance the gay agenda.”
Limbaugh on Tuesday told his listeners that the media’s “soap storyline of the hour” is whether or not Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer will veto SB 1062, which the state’s legislature passed last week.
“Religious beliefs can’t be used to stop anything the left wants to impose, unless they’re Muslim religious beliefs and then we have to honor those. But any other religious beliefs are not permitted,” Limbaugh said. “The left will not allow them. Now, the current thinking is that Gov. Brewer will probably veto the bill, which, you might think on the face of it will make her a hero with the news media and the rest of the left.”
Sure, it might make her a hero, he said — “for five minutes.” And then she’ll go back to being a “near criminal conservative Republican,” Limbaugh continued, because “their reaction will be, what took her so long? Why did she even consider not vetoing this?”
“She’s being bullied by the homosexual lobby in Arizona and elsewhere,” he said. “She’s being bullied by the nationwide drive-by media, she’s being bullied by certain elements of corporate America in order to advance the gay agenda. I guess in that circumstance bullying is admirable. In fact, this kind of bullying is honorable.”
Opponents of the bill, meanwhile, say the measure is discriminatory and anti-gay, and Republican Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake have both urged Brewer to veto it.
While Limbaugh kept his focus on the “bullying” of Brewer during Tuesday’s show, several other conservative radio hosts say they’re more concerned with the implications it has for First Amendment issues.
TheBlaze’s Dana Loesch, who also hosts a daily radio show, told POLITICO that she doesn’t “think that the government has the right to command labor or free expression under any circumstances.”
“I completely support the right of a gay baker to refuse service to the Westboro cult on the basis of belief. It’s their right in what I presume to still be a free country. I completely support the right of black business owners to refuse business to the klan,” she said.
And, Loesch added, “I also personally like knowing what a business owner believes. For instance, when I see ‘no guns allowed on these premises’ in shop windows, I simply go somewhere else. The power of the dollar.”
“If it’s known that a business owner is racist, I’ll just go somewhere else. I like the choice of knowing. Apparently some don’t,” she said. “It’s a scary day when the government can force indentured servitude and blind commerce.”
SiriusXM’s David Webb said his initial reaction to the legislation is more a question of where the priorities of the government should lie. While it’s clearly “important to some,” the question remains: “Is this a priority over the economy, border security, foreign policy?”
As an American, a person has both “a right to build a business with private money and choose the parameters” of their business and also the “freedoms of our religious beliefs,” the tea party activist and Fox News contributor said.
“My take is get off the social issues, but respect the rights of people to have their beliefs, whether you agree with them or not,” he said. “And that applies left or right.”
Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey, meanwhile, in a blog post on Tuesday called the bill a “legislative sledgehammer coming in response to the abuse of another legislative sledgehammer, thanks to the redefinition of ‘tolerance’ to ‘forced acceptance and participation.’”
What he suggests, instead, is “a lot more old-school tolerance and a healthy respect for personal choice as the antidote.”
“Tolerance does not mean acceptance or participation,” he wrote in a column for The Week. “It means allowing people to make their own choices about what they choose to do, and to respect the ability of their fellow citizens to do the same as long as it does no injury to them. What this contretemps shows is that America is getting a lot more intolerant the more ‘tolerant’ we become.”
Rush: Brewer being "bullied" to veto
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