While proofreading pages, I caught a potentially racist presumption inserted into a SacBee editorial about Hobby Lobby’s stance on paying for employees’ birth control: “Business owners have no right to impose their religious beliefs about contraception on workers” (March 25).
On the page proof, near the end of the editorial, a sentence originally read: “The owner of a barbecue restaurant who objects to serving African Americans on religious grounds could defy the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” I saw a problem with using specifically “barbecue restaurant” in this context rather than just any restaurant. (Why should we assume that black people would eat at a barbecue restaurant at all -- or more than people of other ethnicities?)
My slot person agreed, and we changed the sentence to read “restaurant chain” instead of “barbecue restaurant.”
