90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Girls With Guns

For most of his life, Lyndon McLellan has been in the business of country stores—the types of stores where the employees know customers’ names by heart and workers remain loyal for years and years.

His parents owned a general store and grill, and McLellan began helping out there at the ripe old age of 9. Then, 14 years ago, McLellan decided to try his hand at the family business and purchased his own store in the heart of the Bible Belt, naming it L&M Convenience Mart.

Business has been good for McLellan, and though L&M, located in Fairmont, N.C., began as just a convenience store and gas station, he’s since expanded it to include a restaurant that serves hot dogs, hamburgers and catfish sandwiches.

While most of his employees and their families spend Sunday mornings making right with God, McLellan skips church to man the store. He’s there on Christmas Day and during Thanksgiving dinner—a sacrifice McLellan makes for his employees.

“It’s my livelihood,” he told The Daily Signal. “This is all I know how to do. I’m 50 years old, and if I had to do something else, I’d probably be in trouble. This is what I was brought up in. This is all I know.”

What McLellan didn’t know, though, was that the federal government could come in and take away what he’d worked so hard for.

On a summer day last July, McLellan, who hadn’t yet arrived at the store, received a phone call from one of his employees summoning him to L&M. More than a dozen federal agents had flooded into his business—officers from North Carolina’s Alcohol and Law Enforcement, the local police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and they were asking for him.

“It’s my livelihood. This is all I know how to do. I’m 50 years old, and if I had to do something else, I’d probably be in trouble,” said Lyndon McLellan.

When McLellan arrived at the store, he met two federal agents dressed in suits who asked to speak with him in private. McLellan led the agents to...

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Girls With Guns

In March 2014, pioneering Internet company Mozilla announced the appointment of co-founder Brendan Eich as CEO. That same day, a Twitter mob exploded with criticism of Eich. Gay rights supporters were angry about a 6-year-old donation of $1,000 to the “Yes on 8” campaign, which sought to ban same-sex marriage in California in 2008.

It’s OK to be angry about Eich’s donation. Screaming for Eich’s head on a pike for his failure to conform to Mozilla’s majority view on same-sex marriage is not.

Liberals are supposed to believe in protecting minority views, even when they disapprove of those views.

Instead an online mob of presumably “liberal” people tweeted about Eich’s donation, many calling him a bigot and homophobe for supporting Prop 8. Remember, this proposition passed the same year Senator Barack Obama sat in Rick Warren’s church to explain his religious based opposition to...