Christian Dingus, 28, was with his partner when, he says, employees told the couple not to kiss inside, and the argument escalated outside.
A gay man accused a group of Washington, D.C., Shake Shack employees of beating him after he kissed his boyfriend inside the location while waiting for their order.
Christian Dingus, 28, was with his partner and a group of friends at a Dupont Circle location Saturday night when the incident occurred, he told NBC News. They had put in their order and were hanging around waiting for their food.
“And while we were back there — kind of briefly — we began to kiss,” Dingus said. “And at that point, a worker came out to us and said that, you know, you can’t be doing that here, can’t do that type of stuff here.”
The couple separated, Dingus said, but his partner got upset at the employee and insisted the men had done nothing wrong. Dingus’ partner was then allegedly escorted out of the restaurant, where a heated verbal argument occurred.
Even a full-on gay orgy in the dead center of the restaurant is no excuse for violence.
But beyond that, people who are bothered by PDA are so fucking lame. You really want a sterile, sexless world devoid of passion and expressions of love? I think that sounds so fucking miserable
You really want people fingering each other on a park bench next to the little league field? See, I can play the extreme straw man game too.
I don’t think we should encourage it, but frankly I also don’t think it’s the apocalyptic moral event others seem to either. Humanity fucked outside, in relative public for centuries and I’m pretty sure not every single child of that era was forever traumatized by it.
Removed by mod
To a degree they do. Businesses have the right to refuse service, but not if doing so appears to be targeting somebody for discriminatory reasons. Since the impetus here seems to be the kiss between two men, if they aren’t asking opposite-sex couples who engage in the same to leave then this actually is not a legal request. There’s some context here that is impossible to know, so frankly I’m not really keen to make a clear determination one way or the other personally, but I still wanted to point out that it’s not really automatically as simple as “the business asked them to leave.”