Angry in the Great White North

The more I think about this story, the more I wonder just what these people were thinking. A woman in Montreal was treated like trash in a gay club:

A woman who was turned away from a gay bar has filed a human rights complaint.

From that first sentence, you would think the owner of the bar politely told the woman she could not enter the establishment. But that is not, in fact, what is alleged to have happened:

Audrey Vachon was recently refused service at Le Stud in Montreal's gay village after sitting down with her father for a quiet afternoon pint.

A waiter came over and told her father, Gilles, that the bar doesn't serve women.

Vachon, 20, says the waiter avoided looking at her during the conversation.

"On the spot I didn't believe it, I thought it was a bad joke," Vachon said today in an interview.

"I didn't say a word until I'd left. I was too shocked. I was embarrassed, I was humiliated, I felt guilty that I'd even gone there, like I'd done something wrong."

Here's the thing. When you are allowed entry into a bar, you expect to be served. To be allowed to come in and then to be allowed to sit down, only to be told you won't be served, well, that's just mean spirited.

Now restaurants and bars can refuse service to people to someone who disrupts the reasonable comfort of other patrons. For instance, someone who is intoxicated can be refused service.

So as far as I can tell, that this woman entered the bar was not considered to constitute reasonable discomfort for the other patrons, and she was allowed to come in. But that she could spoken to by the staff, and even be seen with a drink in her hand, well, that did cross the line and so she was expected to sit in silence and be ignored.

Or better yet, leave.

Does this seem absurd to you? What reasonable discomfort would the gay male patrons have suffered if she had been given a beer? Does it seem reasonable that had she been allowed to buy a drink, the gay male patrons of the bar would have been so horrified that afternoon business would have collapsed?

Or worse, there might have been a violent reaction from the gay crowd.

Do gay men have a problem seeing women drinking in their presence?

Remember, this is really a gender issue, not a sexual orientation. Vachon's father was offered service, though it was reasonable to assume that he was heterosexual since he was a father (of course, it doesn't have to be true, but it is likely). Yet he was spoken to by the staff. The account we have heard does not include a challenge by the staff that Vachon's father declare his sexual preference. Nor, for that matter, is Audrey Vachon asked to declare her preference. She could have been a life-long lesbian, but to the staff of this bar, it was her gender that created an atmosphere of discomfort for the gay male patrons.

Now my question is this. How can we extend this right to discriminate based on gender across all sectors of Canadian society? Golf courses, private clubs, and so forth? In Canada, the Supreme Court upheld the right of a club or organization to refuse membership on the basis of gender in Gould v. Yukon Order of Pioneers. But in this the focus was on membership to a private club. There was no formal membership requirement to gain entry to Le Stud in Montreal. But the Le Stud incident essentially allows for a group of men to enter into an establishment, loudly declare that they are gay, and so demand that no women be allowed service going forward.

So if a bunch of heterosexual males wanted to go into a bar and watch boxing on the big screen without their wives or girlfriends ruining the evening, then just declare their raging queerness, and hey presto no women can come in.

OK, that's absurd, but then these sorts of incidents are based on the absurd. And there is nothing more absurd than watching homosexuals demand equal rights -- you know what they mean by "equal".