Tacos, with a side of bigotry
To hear her tell it, Margie Christoffersen is a hapless victim with a shattered life. ”I’ve almost had a nervous breakdown,” she tells the LA Times in a column published this Sunday. “It’s been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Through sobs, she tells the reporter how hard her life has been since she was outed online for contributing $100 in support of Proposition 8, the ballot measure to restrict marriage in California to heterosexual couples only. Christoffersen is the manager and public face of El Coyote, an LA landmark famous for its throngs of customers. Following the Prop 8, revelation, though, many of those customers apparently decided to go elsewhere. Business is off 30 percent and large sections of the restaurant sit empty.
Now Christofferson is singing a slightly different tune. “I love [gay people] like anyone else,” she tells the Times. But as the proverb goes, she’s already put her money where her mouth was, and that’s on the side of intolerance.
Nobody, gay or straight, was trying to deny Christoffersen anything–not her business, not her (heterosexual!) marriage– but that didn’t stop her from not just voting for, but actually coughing up $100 to support an intitiative to rescind the rights of thousands of gay Californians. She may never come around on the gay marriage issue, but, with the restaurant once owned by her mother at the brink of collapse, at least now she knows what it feels like to have the most important thing in your life taken away.
Tags: bigots, El Coyote, gay rights, marriage rights, Prop 8