Last month, Jesse Lee Peterson wrote a column for WND suggesting that if anti-gay Christian business owners are going to be required to serve gay customers, they ought to do so by informing any gay customers “upfront that they would take their money and donate it to a conservative Christian law firm to fight against same-sex marriage.”
Shortly after posting that column, Peterson discussed this “solution” on his radio program and, during the course of that discussion, declared that business owners should be free to discriminate against anyone they choose. As such, Peterson said, it was wrong civil activists to launch sit-ins and protests against racially discriminatory business owners during the Civil Rights Era.
“It was wrong during the so-called Civil Rights Movement,” Peterson said, “when they forced private white businesses like cafes and restaurants and things like that, when they allowed black people to do sit-ins on private white businesses, those folks who did not want black people in there.”
Arguing that any business owner that wanted to refuse service to black customers had every right to do so, Peterson said that “it was wrong to let blacks do sit-ins on private businesses.”
“You can’t take away someone else’s freedom like that just to make someone else feel good,” he said:
