Arrière Village, Indiana — Mike Impaurito lives in a small town in southeast Indiana. Mike is also the co-owner of “Burgers, Brews and Bros,” an establishment he and three friends from the Indiana School of Business started just after graduating. Mike describes the food as “casual awesomeness” and “meat you just can’t wait to get in your mouth.” Mr. Impaurito describes the ambience of Burgers, Brews and Bros to be “family friendly” and “traditionally American.” Mike openly admits he is a proud, evangelical Christian, and over the weekend, he hung on a sign on the entrance to his restaurants that caused quite a stir, both in Arrière Village, but across conservative social media.
“Fuck Faggots!” the sign boldly proclaimed in a 28 point Comic Sans font.
“Our new Religious Freedom Restoration Act I feel reaffirms my right to express my religious beliefs openly and proudly,” Impaurito told our reporter. “Apparently, some have taken umbrage to a business that asks for government-backed asset protection that is open to the public denying service to people based on things they have no control over,” Mike told us, “and so they started sending us threats.”
We asked Mr. Impaurito to provide us copies of the threats he alleges he was sent after posting his rather unequivocal condemnation of homosexuality. He told us that he seemed to have accidentally deleted the emails. “Believe me, they were threatening. That’s why I sent them off to Dash’s show,” Mike told us.
The Dash he was referring to is Dash Madison, a local conservative radio host who posted a picture of Mike’s sign in front of his burger joint with a caption of, “Alright! This is what I call standing up to the Hidden Gay Agenda! #RFRA4Lyphe” The picture spread like wildfire, and that’s when Impaurito said his restaurant started getting hit with tremendously negative Yelp! reviews. That’s when Madison stepped in again, asking on Twitter for Dana Loesch, another conservative pundit who recently helped another anti-LGBT pizza establishment in the state crowdfund over $750,000 after its owners said in an interview they’d refuse to cater a gay wedding.
What happened next, Impaurito says, was nothing short of a God-given miracle. “The next thing I know, Dash is emailing a link to a crowd funding site that he and Loesch and a few other conservative media members put together for me. You can imagine how astonished I was to find out my friends and I were going to be billionaires.” According to Impaurito, when he followed the link that Madison emailed him, he was stunned to see that anonymous donors had contributed $1.7 billion to his business. “It was like an Easter Miracle, and I truly believe it shows that if you are willing to stand up for Biblical marriage, God will provide for you. I wonder how much money I could get if I put a sign up saying we’ll only serve couple from arranged marriages, or kings with a bevvy of wives? Talk about biblical traditions!”
The Political Garbage Chute contacted Madison to ask him a few questions, namely why he thinks a business owner who declares their discriminatory feelings toward anyone deserves to be given such a substantial financial reward. “I just thought that it was terrible that people were being mean to this guy for doing nothing more than expressing an opinion that 30 years ago would have gotten him cheered, is all,” Madison told us. We asked Madison if LGBT people in Indiana have a right to feel hurt and angered by being used as a prop to garner Impaurito’s burger stand and the pizza place a few towns over so much money. “These businesses were facing boycotts, and so we wanted to make sure that speaking the Lord’s Truth in America can’t cost you your livelihood.”
“Clearly, the lesson here is that if you are willing to put yourself on the line to stand up for principles and traditions that don’t make sense in any modern context, and if those principles are pretty gross sounding to most intelligent people now, conservatives will fall all over themselves to give you money,” Impaurito said. “Hell, if I were poor, I’d just go on Fox News, tell people angry libs threatened my business after I did something anti-LGBT, and let the money trickle in. Not that I did that. At all. I was like, uh, really threatened man.”
Impaurito says he and his partners don’t know how they plan to spend the money exactly, but that they will definitely be making considerable donations via their new 501(c)3 corporation to various Republican candidates in the upcoming election cycle. “Gotta keep the cash in the family, know what I’m saying,” asked Impaurito as the interview ended.
