Portland bar owner must pay $400,000 for kicking transgender patrons out of bar
PORTLAND, OR, September 4, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Portland bar owner will have to pay a $400,000 fine for kicking out a group of cross-dressers whom he says were ruining his business.
Chris Penner, the owner of the Twilight Room Annex, has to pay 11 transgender patrons the hefty sum after asking them to stop coming to his bar.
Mike Zacchino/The Oregonian
Penner said female patrons complained that the transgender men went to the restroom with the stall doors open, then left the toilet seats up when they were finished.
“I feel for this bar owner. Obviously these gender-confused men who want to be 'women' were causing him to lose customers with their outrageous behavior,” Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, told LifeSiteNews.com. “Now he's been hit with a massive fine courtesy of discriminatory pro-LGBT laws.”
Penner left a voicemail asking the men, who call themselves the T-Girls, to stop coming to his bar (then called the P Club) every Friday.
“People think that a.) We’re a tranny bar or b.) We’re a gay bar. We are neither,” he said. “People are not coming in because they just don’t want to be here on a Friday night now.”
One of T-Girls, who calls himself “Cassandra Lynn,” said he suffered months of sleeplessness after the phone call. Others said they quit going out in public dressed as women, according to a UPI story.
Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian called their bouncing "an indignity that is severe."
"Somehow I find it hard to believe that biologically-male 'transgenders' using the women's restroom was part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream,” LaBarbera told LifeSiteNews.
“This case shows that the battle is not just between Christians and the Homosexual/Transgender Lobby. It's between true liberty and the 'gay-transgender' agenda,” he said.
“The reality,” LaBarbera said, is that legal innovations like “'LGBT rights' come at the expense of freedom.”
“America becomes less and less free with each politically correct 'gay' victory," he said.
The fine comes shortly after news broke that the bakers in Gresham, Orgeant, who refused to make a cake for a gay “wedding” have now closed their store. Oregon's Bureau of Labor and Industries is investigating Sweet Cakes by Melissa, owned by Melissa and Aaron Klein, for the January incident sparked by the Klein's religious objection to same-sex “marriage.”
The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled last month that Elane Photographers, a Christian-owned business, has no right to refuse to take pictures at a same-sex “commitment ceremony” under state law. The New Mexico Human Rights Act, the court ruled, forbids discrimination “against protected classes of people.”
Penner's fine was the first penalty of the 182 complaints filed under the 2007 Oregon law.
