Restaurant Makes Horrible Abuse Joke in Support of Adrian Peterson

Did anyone else wonder what it would look like if a restaurant did something in perfect inverse douche proportion to the awesomeness of the Baltimore restaurants who publicly flipped off Ray Rice? Well, now we know!

Eesh, brace yourself for this one. Last weekend, Weggy’s on Campus in Mankato, Minnesota, posted the following (since-deleted) facebook status:

Where do we even begin here? This is shitty in so many different directions. First, you have the obvious — it doesn’t just support a child abuser and degrade his victims, it mocks those who care about abused children (and there’s solid evidence there has been more than one in Peterson’s case). Regardless of whether you believe corporal punishment is an effective tool for disciplining a child (hint: no) (further hint: really, really no), if you’ve seen the pictures and heard the stories about the specific “discipline” that Peterson administered, you either have to admit it was excessive or acknowledge that you have no moral compass.* Even most of those who don’t think Peterson did anything wrong would have the common decency not to crack jokes at the kid’s expense.**

It would be bad enough if it was just offensive to child abuse victims, but that’s not the full picture of the awfulness here. As we’ve seen highlighted in detail over the past two days, sexual harassment and, quite frankly, assault are endemic to the service industry, and when confronted with that behavior, those responsible don’t even see anything wrong with it. It’s awful enough when customers engage in that sort of behavior, but Weggy’s basically just completely hung their servers out to dry and told patrons they didn’t care if they abused their employees — hell, they even encouraged it. It’s also sad, half-assed excuse for a joke; they basically shouted “HAR HAR, ABUSE AND HARASSMENT!” and just called it a day, like an even more intellectually lazy Anthony Jeselnik.

Steve Wegman, the owner of Weggy’s, took down the facebook post almost immediately, which isn’t surprising, since the backlash started right away since anyone with a semblance of humanity can see how screwed-up that is. He blamed an employee who “simply thought they were being funny” and pledged a promotion that donates to “a local charity.” Unless it’s a child abuse/domestic violence/sexual assault charity, that shit’s going to ring hollow, though, and given that it seems the employee still has their job, I question how seriously Wegman actually cares about this.

Good rule in general if you want to not be a piece of shit: don’t mock abuse victims. Ever. For any reason. No exceptions.

* Peterson isn’t the only NFL player guilty of this, obviously, as others have likewise shown their ass — although props to Vikings Hall of Famer Chris Carter for being, apparently, the lone functioning adult in the room. The implications of that Reggie Bush link are somehow even worse than the Peterson story itself, which should not be possible.