Discrimination Sucks

Discrimination sucks. It doesn’t matter if it’s because of race, religion, age, disability, or sexual orientation, any and all forms of discrimination sucks.

Recently, the Supreme Court handed down a decision, on its last day of its term that nondiscrimination laws could not be enforced against businesses that offer expressive products and services.

The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis was initiated by a web designer who feared she would have to create wedding sites for gay couples because there was a law preventing her from discriminating against same-sex clients. The Court decided that her “design” constituted expression and therefore was protected speech, so the nondiscrimination law would not apply to her.

What does this mean?

Well, it means that a lot of businesses can now openly discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation. This is supposed to affect only those whose businesses involve a degree of artistry or creativity, but we all know it is going to open up a lot more businesses to discriminate.

Not only does this open the door for businesses to discriminate based on someone’s sexual orientation, but it also allows them to discriminate based on a person’s age, religion, race, and other factors.

Recently, we got a call from our Vegas hotel telling us that the Ahern Hotel was no longer going to do business with ‘events like ours”. When we asked them what that meant, they said that they were canceling our room block and that we needed to find another hotel.

Of course, we were in shock. I (Bob) called the General Manager myself and asked him what was going on but he wouldn’t tell me. All he would say was that their legal team decided that their brand could no longer do business with “our” kind of events anymore.

We had no issues at Naughty Sin City last year and I asked him if we could just go forward with the event as planned and we would look for another hotel in 2024. He said he would see what he could do, and I never heard back from him again. Instead, we got a cease and desist letter a few days later from their legal department to stop advertising the event.

So what really happened? We can only deduct two things?

1.     A week earlier another “lifestyle event” took place at the hotel. I am not sure what happened at this party, but I’m guessing it caused the hotel to rethink its policy about having lifestyle events at the Ahern. Even though this has nothing to do with us, the result ended up having a lot to do with us.

2.     The Supreme Court decision came out around the same time, which also makes me think it had something to do with the decision to cancel our event.

Either way, not only our event was canceled, but another “lifestyle event” at the Ahern was canceled. To make this even weirder, the hotel was still taking reservations for our group and sending us rooming reports even after we received the cease and desist email.

We had to make a decision on whether or not to try to force the hotel to host our event, to look for another hotel, or to just cancel the event outright. After talking to some attorneys about the situation, we decided that forcing the hotel to honor our contract would be difficult to do in such a short time, and they would have no incentive to provide the service and experience we require and expect, so that option was out.

We called a bunch of hotels, reached out to the Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau, and could not find a hotel anywhere close to the size of the Ahern (200 rooms) with a large conference space that didn’t already have a lot of rooms booked. There were no viable options, so we finally decided to cancel.

Discrimination sucks.

We did nothing wrong. In fact, the hotel loved our event last year and we got a lot of great feedback from the GM, and many of the top management at the Ahern. The hotel gladly agreed to host another Naughty Sin City event and started taking bookings immediately. We got weekly reports on our sales and everything was a go until we were told that there was a change and that “our type” of event was no longer an option at the Ahern.

Well, who knows what the next step will be? The hotel does not engage in any type of creative or artistic services. They should not be able to discriminate against us because of “our” type of attendees. They shouldn’t be able to arbitrarily cancel our event.

But they did.

We need to stand up for what is right and we urge all of our friends and fans to support organizations like the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation (WFF) because these are some of the only organizations that are actively fighting discrimination against people like us. Against people with different sexual orientations and relationship models.

Don’t sit back and allow this to happen.

We raised close to $25,000 for NCSF at Naughty N’awlins this year. That’s just a drop in the bucket when it comes to legal cases like this. Please click on the links to the organizations above, become a supporting member, and keep informed through their newsletters about the fight to protect the rights of all of us.

Because discrimination sucks, no matter who is being discriminated against.