160.6 - Outrage of the Week: domestic violence is not like beer

Outrage of the Week: domestic violence is not like beer

Finally for this week, our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week. And this was truly so bad - well, I had something entirely different in mind for this segment, but when I dame across this, I found it so outrageous, so offensive, that I can hardly describe my reaction.

This appeared on a chalkboard at Scruffy Duffies, a bar in Plano, Texas:

"I like my beer like I like my violence. Domestic."

And someone thought that was funny.

To make it worse, if that's possible, when a woman named Courtney Williams, who was at the bar, complained to multiple managers about it, saying it was in extremely poor taste and should be taken down, she was told she was overly emotional, too "aggressive," and should "calm down."

Apparently, she was just some hysterical female, not to be taken seriously.

However, after she left and apparently when it could be done without the managers admitting they did it because some hysterical women wanted them to, the sign was taken down.

But the story got out and the bar got flak, so management responded with a statement blaming an unnamed female - yes, they specified female - employee with "writing something offensive without owner's approval." Apparently the multiple managers to which Williams complained weren't concerned with the owner's approval, either.

And the worst of it, as always, was in the comments on the article, heavily populated with knuckle-dragging yahoos - when they get together like this, I have coined the group term "a malevolence of machos" - with a malevolence of machos going on about how by objecting to this sort of scum-baggery, "you're taking away our freedom," and "it was just a joke," and blaming Williams for the whole incident.

Each day, on average, three women in the US are murdered by an intimate male partner - husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends. Despite the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, the US still has the highest rate of domestic violence murder of any industrialized nation.

No, the only "freedom" you could lose is the "freedom" to be a complete rock-brained jackass and no, it was not "just a joke." It was an outrage.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/bar-domestic-violence-joke_n_5397927.html
http://domesticviolencestatistics.org/domestic-violence-statistics/