Shut your sodding yap

Continually I am assaulted by a public that go about their daily lives cocooned in the smug glow of their personal rights as some talisman against consequence. They stroll on in through my doors with the intention of deriving entertainment from my shelves. Unfortunately, the distraction they are seeking is not one of purchasing something new and exciting to take home and experience. Instead, they wish to employ my store as a convenient freak show without entry fee.

It isn't difficult to identify them. Their progress is marked with an almost continual giggling, gasps, and exclamations of shock. If they pick an item up, it is to share it with a friend for a shared laugh. Protestations "that is just is not right" keep pace with expressions of disgust and mockery.

Recently, I encountered a group of late teens who began their little tour of shock and squeals in the toys. They devoted themselves to hunting for the biggest, most intimidating dildos they could find on our shelves. One more instance of the run-of-the-mill normalization of personal traits through a pack mentality of assignment of deficiency to those not of the group honed through grade school. Once they had burned through as much benefit of the doubt as I was willing to extend them, they were mining the fetish, gay, and she-male movie racks for new fodder.

This is not conduct conducive toward a happy, judgment-free shopping environment and it gets old real fucking fast. I'd even go so far as to say it's been stale for an hour before the first titter hits the air. Quite typically, these sparkling personages are very affronted when called on their behavior and either told to keep their comments to themselves or informed they are no longer welcome on the premises. After all, they have the Right to say what they want.

All of which makes me want to press a branding iron into their foreheads to sear to the bone their title as "moron" to the rest of the world while bellowing, "Wrong cretin!" In this case, I settled for giving a terse statement that they needed to shop someplace else immediately because they could not conduct themselves in a respectful, mature manner.

Their Rights. Bah! Do I look like a bloody government? I only possess enough mass to constitute a modestly-sized human male, even a nation as petite as say, Vatican City has me out-massed (no pun intended) by orders of magnitude. Since I am not a government body, I am not constrained by the Bill of Rights.

To put it bluntly, no, you don't have the right to free speech here. The store is private property and as a fully authorized caretaker of the property by the owner, I can censor people to my little black heart's content. I don't because it isn't polite as well as harmful to the goals of trading as much of our merchandise as I can for the most amount of money I can chip loose. Hell, for that matter, there is no freedom of the press within the property lines. There is no freedom of religion nor is there is any prohibition against self-incrimination. It would serve you well to heed such information before you start sputtering about how you have the right to carry forth about whatever the fuck you want in any way you feel like when standing on someone else's private property.

To those who have squealed about how I'm stepping on your personal freedoms in enforcing store policy, here's a little wake up call. As soon as you set foot upon the property, you shed some autonomy. It is no longer allowable for you to express disgust for another person's tastes. It is no longer tolerable for you to state that a given item is aberrant or sick. You do not have the right to dictate sexuality to your fellow customers just as they do not have the right to dictate your's to you. You do not have the right to dismiss or condemn a given fetish you find represented on the shelves. You have the right to find things that make your nether bits tingle happily. You do not have the right to laugh at what gets other people's nether bits tingly.

In short, your so called "rights" end as soon as they intrude on another's.