09:11 – With the firestorm over the Indiana religious freedom act, I’m not surprised that North Carolina’s governor has announced that he will not support a similar law that’s been proposed here. That’s a shame. As my regular readers know, I absolutely support full civil rights for gay people, but I also absolutely support full civil rights for everyone else, and that includes people who don’t like gay people.
There’s no conflict there, and the only reason there might appear to be is that the progressives intentionally conflate actions taken by the government with actions taken by individuals and private businesses. In short, the government should not be permitted to discriminate in any way against any citizen, but individuals and private businesses have the Constitutional right to discriminate in any way they see fit. The government cannot refuse to recognize marriages between people of the same sex, but individuals and private companies have the right to discriminate in any way they see fit.
A bakery that is owned by a religious person and refuses to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple is within its rights, as is a photographer who refuses to shoot pictures of a gay wedding or a dress shop that refuses to provide a wedding dress for a gay couple. It’s their businesses, and they have a right to serve or not serve any customer, as they see fit. I think anyone who refuses to provide services or goods to a gay person is contemptible, and I would refuse to patronize that business, but they have the absolute right to be contemptible. A church has the absolute right to refuse to marry gay couples (or straight couples) if it is so inclined, or to refuse to allow gay people (or straight people) to be members of its congregation. A landlord has the absolute right to refuse to rent to gays (or straights) or, come to that, to women (or men) or blacks (or whites) or atheists (or Southern Baptists). None of this is any of the government’s business.
Barbara is going to the gym after work. She’s making beef Stroganoff for dinner using only long-term storage stuff, including a can of Keystone Meats ground beef. I’d ordered a case of the stuff some months ago, and wanted to try it before I ordered another two or three cases. I’m sure it’ll be fine. After all, Keystone is a family business whose only product is canned meat products, so they’d be foolish to use anything other than top quality meats. I talked to Lisa at Keystone and mentioned that I suspected that the 5-year best-by date was pretty much imaginary and that their meats would still be fine long after that. She just laughed and said that they were extremely conservative in choosing a 5-year best-by date.
Barbara has been buying Costco ground beef in 5-packs of 1-pound tubes. I asked her last night how much ground beef we consumed per year. She estimated we go through one 5-pound package every couple of months. That’s 30 pounds a year, so we could stock 150 pounds without exceeding even the best-by date. When you consider that we may not have access to fresh meat in an emergency, we’d be dependent on canned stuff, so keeping even seven or eight cases on hand wouldn’t be excessive. Assuming we like it, which I suspect we will. As Barbara pointed out last night, the Keystone ground beef is precooked, which makes it a lot faster to make up beef Stroganoff, spaghetti sauce, or ground beef casseroles.
We have only three episodes of Heartland series eight left to watch. After that, we may start Murdoch Mysteries series eight, the last episode of which ran last night.
