Does Anyone Really Believe This?

In the latest event of "victimhood" a waitress at a suburban Chicagoland Outback Steakhouse has prompted some Teabagger "outrage" over the weekend because she was allegedly fired for wearing a Tea Party "Don't Tread On Me" bracelet to work.

Here's the Huffpost story on this poor girl:

Tea Party members gathered outside a suburban Chicago Outback Steakhouse over the weekend after a waitress at the restaurant claimed she was fired for wearing a Tea Party bracelet to work.

Megan Geller, 23, claims a couple dining at the Crystal Lake, Ill. steakhouse was offended by her "Don’t Tread On Me" bracelet in early October. They allegedly complained to management, and she was fired shortly after, Geller's mother told the Northwest Herald.

Tonya Franklin, Geller's mother, told the Herald that she gave her daughter the yellow bracelet after receiving it at a Tea Party event. Franklin joined protesters in calling the firing a violation of Geller's free speech.

“They stirred up the wrong hornet’s nest and messed with the wrong mama,” Franklin told the Herald. “When mamas get mad, mamas get to work.”

"Free speech"? Really? You're gonna try to go with that?

I'd like to wake little Megan -- and especially that shrew of a mother of hers -- up to the fact that this is not a "free speech" issue. Sorry, girls. Only the government can be guilty of suppressing free speech. Not an individual, not a business, and not even the worst imaginable management.

Little Megan needs to suck it up and understand that when you sell your time to an employer in this society, you are little more than a paid slave. Absent any kind of union protection (which I am sure that she doesn't have and, given her mother's Teabagger proclivities, shouldn't even want...), you work at the pleasure and the will of your employer, and if the Outback Restaurant doesn't want you wearing something that could prove disruptive to their business, you'd better do what they say and take it off.

But of course Outback has a different slant on things:

Company officials, however, told the Associated Press that Geller was inattentive to to diners at two tables, and that if the bracelet had been an issue, they would have asked her to take it off. Management also said that Geller yelled at them when they spoke to her about complaints from diners.

Ah ha!

Now I've never been one to carry a brief for national chains of any kind, but it only stands to reason that management would have asked her -- told her -- to take it off before they fired her. But this seems to me to be a clear case of a whiny-assed little girl who won't do what she is told, doesn't pay attention to her work and is rude to her bosses. I don't care what business you work in, you can't do that and expect to walk away from it without consequences.

Another case of fake victimhood. I call bullshit on it, and I call bullshit on Megan and I call bullshit on her mother.