"WE DON'T CATER TO YOU PEOPLE"

This was going to be a two parter. But both stories are worth their own entries. And yeah I'm apt to get  snarky before I'm done. I'm on the north side of sixty folks. I'm running out of time to waste being polite.

Some interesting links on my Facebook page this morning. The first has to do with the craft giant Hobby Lobby. I'd run across part of the story a couple of months ago. This article has a fuller story and the author did research to back up some of the claims.  The original incident happened in a store in New Jersey. You know. The little state across the Hudson from the city that probably has the largest population of Jews in the country. "We don't cater to you people." Ok. Short people? Tall people? Red Heads? Folks with lots of freckles? Folks who wear saris and turbans?

The company's mission statement.  Employees “honor the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with biblical principles.” Let's not examine some of those Biblical principals too closely shall we? And WTF do you think wrote the Old Testament in the first place? And where do you think Yeshua bar Joseph and his followers worshiped? The megachurch on the other side of town? Not bloody likely. They went to the local synagogue. They were Jews. They kept the Holy Days. They were "you people."

Incidentally this weekend is the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. The orchestrated outburst of violence against German Jews, the synagogues and their businesses. If any German Jews had any illusions left about their futures in the New Germany they died that night. Unfortunately thanks to the attitudes of the folks who own Hobby Lobby the options for getting out of Germany before the curtain fell were limited.

It shocked the hell out of me years ago when I learned that the yearly quotas, such as they were, for Jewish immigration to the US were never filled during WWII. Never, even when we knew, and we did know. Finally what was happening in Nazi occupied Europe. Maybe we didn't know the full horror of what was happening, but we knew.

And, it's kind of prosaic after the last couple of paragraphs but is there anyone out there who has shopped at a Hobby Lobby recently? Say last month. I assume that since the owners are such good Christians that there was nary an image of a witch, a black cat or a Jack O Lantern to be found. After all. Halloween is the high jacked version of Samhain, the Celtic New Year. The day when the veil between the worlds is thinnest and the spirits can walk among us. Hardly a holiday to be celebrated by "good" Christians.