On to the post about Maurice's BBQ. What got me thinking about this was that my father-in-law brought some of the sauce with him on a visit. Somewhere in the last few years, they have added the rebel flag on the bottle. I guess once they've been pulled from all the store shelves, there is nothing worse that can happen and they might as well go all out to appeal to their core constituency. As a datum from what I felt two years ago is this post from Usenet (apologies to my newsgroup friends for the absurdly long link). In previous posts other folks were asking why I would stop frequenting a place I liked just because I didn't like the politics of the owner. This post was my attempt to explain that it's more than just disliking the politics, that he is going well out of his way to make his politics part of his business. This is not a man who quietly holds a belief and is being persecuted for it. Bessinger is co-branding his products with a particular brand of southern racism, the same brand that defies flag changes as impinging upon "our traditions" and seeks biblical justification and historical revisionism to rationalize the sins of the old south and the Confederacy.

The last time I ate in one of his Piggie Park restaurants, the whole joint seemed to be in a state of decay with the building noticably deteriorating, no customers and oddest of all, the counter covered with stacks of photocopies of newspaper articles about reverse discrimination cases and stories about wrongdoings of prominent black people. It was really creepy and a dismal experience. Ultimately, my decision not to purchase his products anymore (note that I don't dump it down the sink when it was given as a gift) is driven by the fact that I feel like a scumbag when I give him money. This is materially different from disliking the private politics of a business owner, it is no longer being able to turn off the voice inside my head that says "this food doesn't taste as good as buying it makes me feel bad." ime. When that biblical support is all from Obadiah, it says to me that Jesus was silent on this issue. That makes it all the more suspicious that evangelical Christians are inflamed about an issue that Jesus himself is not on record with an opinion, (ie, homosexuality). That takes an amount of gall I cannot imagine - to consider oneself so holy that it would be reasonable to "fill in the gaps" of the ills Jesus didn't get around to condemning. As I read the Gospels, Jesus was about love, so someone speaking in his name yet whose rhetoric of full of things that are to be hated and shunned (Jerry Falwell) is a liar, a dishonest and conceited bad steward of the word of God.