Muslim barber refuses to cut hair of lesbian: Whose rights trump whose?

Muslim barber refuses to cut hair of lesbian: Whose rights trump whose?

Being a believer in all -isms can get hairy at times. Take as an illustration a case reported in the Toronto Sun by Ezra Levant:

So a lesbian walks into a Muslim barbershop, and asks for a “businessmen’s haircut”.

It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it really happened, and now a government agency called the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario will hear her complaint.

Faith McGregor is the lesbian who doesn’t like the girly cuts that they do at a salon. She wants the boy’s hairdo.

Omar Mahrouk is the owner of the Terminal Barber Shop in Toronto. He follows Shariah law, so he thinks women have cooties. As Mahrouk and the other barbers there say, they don’t believe in touching women other than their own wives.

The incident occurred in Canada in November 2012, but it could easily happen here and now. Let’s take a state at random — say Arizona — and graft on the same scenario. Gay rights activists usually tend to be protectors of adherents to America’s lone “diverse” religion, Islam, so where do their sympathies lie?

This question is a real head scratcher in Canada, which passed a Multiculturalism Act in 1988, paving the way for an influx of immigrants with medieval attitudes toward second-class citizens (read: women and gays). Faith McGregor belongs to both groups.

How to resolve this this “human rights” impasse? Levant envisions a hierarchy similar to the one found in the game of poker, except in this case based on some ad hoc notion of degrees of political correctness. He quips:

A white, Christian male has the lowest hand — it’s like he’s got just one high card, maybe an ace. So almost everyone trumps him.

A white woman is just a bit higher — like a pair of twos. Enough to beat a white man, but not much more.

A gay man is like having two pairs in poker.

A gay woman — a lesbian like McGregor — is like having three of a kind.

A black lesbian is a full house — pretty tough to beat.

Unless she’s also in a wheelchair, which means she’s pretty much a straight flush.

The only person who could trump that would be a royal flush. If the late Sammy Davis Jr. — who was black, Jewish and half-blind — were to convert to Islam and discover he was 1/64th Aboriginal.

So which is a better hand: A lesbian who wants a haircut or a Muslim who doesn’t want to give it to her?

Joking aside, when government attempts to decide which protected class of citizens is more aggrieved in cases like this, they run into trouble. The only “out” is to look the other way, which is what liberals have been doing here for years. The question of tolerance for one protected group over another arose during the murder trial of George Zimmerman, when the prosecution’s star witness Rachel Jeantel intimated under cross-examination that Trayvon Martin was anti-gay. Do you recall any marches by the Lambda Society or GLAAD denouncing blacks for their Stone Age view of homosexuality? Nah. Instead, liberals buried their heads in the sand, waiting till the news cycle moved on to other headlines. Hypocrisy much?

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Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy has written for The Blaze, HotAir, NewsBusters, Weasel Zippers, Conservative Firing Line, RedCounty, and New York’s Daily News. He has one published novel, Hot Rain, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and has been a guest on Radio Vice Online with Jim Vicevich, The Alana Burke Show, Smart Life with Dr. Gina, and The George Espenlaub Show.

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