Secrets of the Hate-Pizza Revolution: Indiana’s Dreadful Culture-War Week
When Zealots are in charge a 20 year sentence for terminating a pregnancy is the norm.
In Indiana this week, it was the worst of times and - no, wait; it was just the worst of times. This was the week of “hate pizza,” one of the weirdest and most revealing non-stories of recent American history, in which a small-town businesswoman’s ill-considered response to a reporter’s hypothetical question became headline news. It was also the week when a 33-year-old Indiana woman named Purvi Patel was sentenced to 20 years in prison for ending her own pregnancy, in the most dramatic application to date of a recent wave of anti-abortion “feticide” laws. Both these Hoosier news stories, with their misunderstood and/or persecuted female protagonists, represent new plot twists in the long-running culture war that underlies America’s political divisions. But one of them has ominous and far-reaching consequences, and it’s the other one that became a huge social-media phenomenon. I won’t even pretend to make you guess which is which.
They represent an entrenched, exurban and politically active white Christian minority that feels deeply uncomfortable with nearly every aspect of contemporary American society, and that increasingly understands itself as a disenfranchised and persecuted identity groupActually, I don’t mean to suggest that the story of Crystal O’Connor and Memories Pizza of Walkerton, Indiana - the family-owned business that would rather not supply hypothetical pepperoni-and-mushroom pies to a hypothetical Adam-and-Steve wedding — is without significance. It certainly has some morbid entertainment value, on approximately the same level as a 1989 Jerry Springer broadcast. But the O’Connor family and their defiantly heterocentric pizzeria are just colorful props or extras, hastily erected and soon to be consigned to the same political-cultural limbo as Joe the Plumber and that lady who lost her job over ignorant tweets about HIV and Africa. They put a human face, so to speak, on the combination of ignorance, bigotry and sheer clumsiness that produced Indiana’s instantly infamous “religious freedom” law, which appeared to allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT people in the name of Jesus.
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