Audio By Carbonatix
Steve Horner, please go back to your corner.
Or at least give the besieged Colorado Civil Rights Commission a
break and concentrate on alleged injustices in Minnesota, where you’re
now living. You know where to file in that state: Back in 1993, you
made your first complaint to the Minnesota Human Rights Department,
claiming that establishments that sponsored ladies’ nights were
committing gender discrimination. You got your headlines, and you also
got bars to change their policy.
If only Horner had stopped there — and stayed there. Instead,
in 1996 he filed a complaint with the same Minnesota agency against the
Hooters located at the Mall of America, after the manager refused to
hire him as a waiter. (Bet he would have looked cute in those orange
shorts.) And when Dolores Fridge, then-deputy commissioner of the Human
Rights Department, didn’t respond favorably to his complaint, Horner
began badgering her. “I was just trying to incite her to enforce the
law,” Horner told a reporter with City Pages, Westword‘s
partner paper in Minneapolis. But the Ramsey County District Court
determined that it was Horner who’d run afoul of the law, and he wound
up serving a thirty-day sentence on three gross misdemeanors and one
count of harassment. “The lawyer I hired wasn’t worth a damn,” Horner
told City Pages. “She just fell into line with the dyke
prosecutor, who was nothing more than a bitch with balls.”
Horner dubbed his time behind bars “The Steve Horner
Self-Improvement Seminar.”
In the summer of 2006, the new, improved Steve Horner finally landed
in Denver, where he promptly filed a complaint against Proof Nightclub
with the Colorado Division of Civil Rights, claiming that its ladies’
nights were discriminatory — and angling for the $500 that the
law allows for each proven case of discrimination. And he was just
warming up. Horner soon complained to the division that the Colorado
Rockies’ ladies’-night deal was discriminatory. He complained to the
division about more bars and then opened another front, filing lawsuits
in Denver County Court. Along the way, he filled voice-mail box after
voice-mail box with his rants, got himself barred from a few offices
and called a Denver judge a “pussy-whipped farthead.”
Last September, after losing a Denver County Court case against
Westword for a ladies’-night ad (at trial, he compared himself
to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.), Horner filed a complaint
against this paper with the Colorado Division of Civil Rights — a
complaint he offered to settle for either $7,000 (the amount we’d need
to pay in order for him to never file against us again) or $20,000 (in
which case he’d also promise to not teach anyone else how to file
against us). And in February, the Division of Civil Rights found
probable cause that a ladies’-night ad in Westword had
discriminated against Horner — although just a year earlier, the
same director at the same division had determined that a ladies’-night
ad in the Denver Post had not discriminated against Horner, and
in his determination cited the judge’s ruling in our Denver County
Court case, a ruling that exempted newspapers.
We pointed out this double standard on double standards to the
Division of Civil Rights two months ago; we’re still waiting for its
response. But then, the department — whose staff has been cut to
the bone by state budget restraints — has been busy. Very busy.
According to spokesman Chris Lines, Horner has filed some thirty
complaints with the division over the last two months. All while he’s
been living out of state.
How can Colorado businesses discriminate against Horner if he’s not
here? From Minnesota, he has no way of knowing if a bar will deny him a
free drink, or if a restaurant will prevent him from attending a
ladies-only wine-tasting (yes, he’s filed a complaint about that, too),
or if the Colorado Rockies will give him the same perks offered women
at last week’s Ladies’ Night. (Team spokesman Jay Alves says they now
give the deal to anyone who asks; remember that on Father’s Day.) Back
in March, Lines had told me that when someone from out of state files a
complaint with the Colorado Division of Civil Rights, it’s
automatically sent back to the complainer’s home state. But the
Colorado Attorney General’s Office disagreed with that interpretation;
Lines says the division is now waiting to have this “jurisdictional”
issue clarified. And in the meantime, those complaints keep coming.
Last week, we received notice of yet another charge of
discrimination that Steve Horner of North Mankato, Minnesota, had made
against Westword, this time claiming that he was “subjected to
retaliation by the Respondent for engaging in a protected activity.”
Specifically, that I attacked his “character” in my March 4 column
pointing out the Division of Civil Rights’ double standard.
This, of course, assumes that Horner has a character — and
also that we’re all willing to overlook a civil right even stronger
than the right to cheap drinks: freedom of speech. Long before I ever
wrote a word about Steve Horner, he was exercising that right quite
vigorously in voice-mail messages and a December 2006 letter to “Dear
gals” at Westword:
“I’m not totally positive but I’m quite sure the Westword ignored
the public conversation surrounding my Ladies’ Night complaint and
subsequent charge of discrimination….
“Now, the only reason I find myself writing to you today is that I
was paging through Westword while waiting for a haircut the other day
and through my unflinching optimism, I know, down deep, you’re really
interested in what’s going on with me and Ladies’ Night and why I’ve
worked so hard at being successful at shutting it down in several other
states. However, I know it would be a waste of my time to explain my
motives in a logical fashion because even though you feign pain and
injury over social discrimination, I know you couldn’t care less about
the civil rights of a bold, testosterone-laden he-man like me having my
civil rights ripped out from beneath me. So, I’ll simply try to piss
you off and tell you what’s next on the agenda with the Ladies’ Night
issue. It’s gonna be fun…”
You asked for it, you got it.
I finally met with Horner a month or so after I received his
charming missive, and took him to a bar that he later filed suit
against. It was amazing to watch him start discussing what, yes, on the
surface appears to be a mild injustice — women drinking free
because bar owners realize that what men want to see in bars is women,
preferably liquored-up women — and then blow it up into the cause
of just about every social ill in the world. Ladies’ nights lead to
homelessness lead to terrorism.
And the people who open the mail at the Division of Civil Rights
have got to be feeling a little terrorized right now.
