Think you can be a state Senator and get away with ignorant remarks about AIDS, the LGBT community and bullying? Not in Martha Boggs’ restaurant you can’t.
Boggs is the owner of The Bistro at the Bijou, a Knoxville eatery where Tennessee GOP State Senator Stacey Campfield went for brunch on Sunday. What he got,instead, was the boot.
Campfield is the one who sponsored the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would prohibit teachers from discussing homosexuality in the classroom before ninth grade. He also went on Michaelangelo Signorile’s radio show and said, among other things, that bullying is “the biggest lark out there,” that it’s nearly impossible “to contract AIDS from heterosexual sex,” that “AIDS came from the homosexual community – it was one guy screwing a monkey if I recall correctly…” and that the lifespan of a homosexual is “very short.”
Boggs saw the Senator waiting to be seated at her restaurant. She had been following some of his comments, she told the Huffington Post, and in her opinion, he had “crossed the line from being controversial to dangerous.” So Boggs impulsively decided not to serve Campfield. She walked up to him and told him to leave, saying she’d made the decision “just to make a point to him (about) how awful he has been.”
“I was incensed that an elected official could make such irresponsible comments,” Boggs said.
She felt she needed to stand up for the LGBT community, from which many of her customers, friends and employees come. Boggs has gotten national coverage and Bistro at the Bijou’s Facebook page is getting a lot of gratitude – from all over the U.S. and the world, from England to Egypt – for her spur-of-the-moment stand. You go, girl!
Boggs is the owner of The Bistro at the Bijou, a Knoxville eatery where Tennessee GOP State Senator Stacey Campfield went for brunch on Sunday. What he got,instead, was the boot.
Campfield is the one who sponsored the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would prohibit teachers from discussing homosexuality in the classroom before ninth grade. He also went on Michaelangelo Signorile’s radio show and said, among other things, that bullying is “the biggest lark out there,” that it’s nearly impossible “to contract AIDS from heterosexual sex,” that “AIDS came from the homosexual community – it was one guy screwing a monkey if I recall correctly…” and that the lifespan of a homosexual is “very short.”
Boggs saw the Senator waiting to be seated at her restaurant. She had been following some of his comments, she told the Huffington Post, and in her opinion, he had “crossed the line from being controversial to dangerous.” So Boggs impulsively decided not to serve Campfield. She walked up to him and told him to leave, saying she’d made the decision “just to make a point to him (about) how awful he has been.”
“I was incensed that an elected official could make such irresponsible comments,” Boggs said.
She felt she needed to stand up for the LGBT community, from which many of her customers, friends and employees come. Boggs has gotten national coverage and Bistro at the Bijou’s Facebook page is getting a lot of gratitude – from all over the U.S. and the world, from England to Egypt – for her spur-of-the-moment stand. You go, girl!
Comments