In America, owners of businesses are punished for refusing their services to gays and lesbians on grounds of religious – that is to say, Christian – objection to homosexuality. (See here and here and here.)

For atheists no such difficulty can arise. Which shows how being without religion can be materially profitable.

We think everyone should be free to provide his services or refuse to provide them to anyone for any reason, or even on a mere whim.

It is the Left that believes in compulsion, and especially in compelling people to do what it ordains is politically correct.

Yet it also believes in letting Muslims do anything they want.

The Left and Islam can only be very uncomfortable bedfellows. There is likely to be an outbreak of domestic violence between them sooner or later.

Meanwhile, we can enjoy a degree of Schadenfreude when their respective ideologies chafe each other.

This is from Liberty Unyielding, by Howard Portnoy:

A lesbian walks into a Muslim barbershop, and asks for a “businessmen’s haircut”.

It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it really happened …

In Canada, in November 2012.

Faith McGregor is the lesbian who doesn’t like the girly cuts that they do at a salon. She wants the boy’s hairdo.

Omar Mahrouk is the owner of the Terminal Barber Shop in Toronto. He follows Sharia law … He [doesn’t] believe in touching women other than [his] own wives. …

So he refused to serve her. Who was in the right?

This question is a real head scratcher in Canada, which passed a Multiculturalism Act in 1988, paving the way for an influx of immigrants with medieval attitudes toward second-class citizens (read: women and gays). Faith McGregor belongs to both groups.

Pity the lefties who have to face this awful dilemma. Portnoy asks them: “which is better (in the sense of who trumps whom), a lesbian who wants a haircut or a Muslim who doesn’t want to give it to her”?

(Hat-tip our Facebook commenter Libby Lael)