PolitiFact supported President Biden as "Mostly True" on Friday for his comments at a "Pride" celebration at the White House on June 10. (That's the "human dignity" event where a "trans woman" displayed his fake breasts on the White House lawn.)
Pushing the so-called "Equality Act," Biden said "When a person can be married in the morning and thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon, something is still very wrong in America."
How often is anyone thrown out of a restaurant for "being gay"? As opposed to people being thrown out of restaurants for being "anti-gay"? Dana Loesch tweeted about then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders being thrown out of a restaurant in Lexington, Virginia in 2018.
Naturally, back then, the liberals at PolitiFact came rushing to that owner's defense, proclaiming it "False" that Stephanie Wilkinson threatened the Trump aide afterwards.
Wilkinson told the Washington Post that Sanders works in an "inhumane and unethical" administration.
"I'm not a huge fan of confrontation," Wilkinson said. But "this feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals."
Some forms of discrimination are encouraged by PolitiFact. Their "fact check"/Biden defense continued:
Biden made a similar statement in December when celebrating the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act.
Although it drew criticism, Biden’s illustration is not without factual backing. Same-sex marriage is federally protected, but dining in a restaurant with your same-sex spouse is not.
However, it is hard to tell how often this sort of discrimination actually occurs and where. We found news reports of same-sex couples being refused service as recently as 2021, but one expert said these instances are on the decline. There’s not good data on how often LGBTQ+ people are still discriminated against in public places, but Biden is accurate that it can happen in America, and is legally allowed in nearly half of the states in the U.S.
So if "there's not good data" to prove Biden's assertion, how is he "Mostly True"? Why can't they simply decide they don't have enough evidence for a "fact check"? This is where liberal journalists pull out the term "without evidence" for Republican claims.
PolitiFact also wanted to blur the issue, pointing out "In 2019, a lesbian couple said a local restaurant in Missouri refused to host the couple’s rehearsal dinner after learning of the couple’s sexual orientation." That's not being "thrown out" of a restaurant. Later, they limped through the charge again:
It’s not clear how often people are "thrown out" of restaurants for their sexual orientation. Incidents like this are difficult to track, but news reports and testimony from legal advocacy groups show that it does happen, including in states that have legal protections.
Biden is accurate in that this can happen, but his remarks need clarification. Some states do provide some legal protection against discrimination and it’s unclear how commonly this occurs. We rate his claim Mostly True.
