Here Comes The Bigotry of the Day: A Highland Park woman was denied the purchase of her “dream bridal gown” from a New Jersey wedding dress store because she is marrying another woman.
Alix Genter, who is set to marry her longtime partner next July, had her dress all picked out when Here Comes the Bride store manager Donna phoned her up and told her she couldn’t buy it because she was a lesbian.
According to Genter, Donna decried the marriage as “illegal” and said the store “do[es] not participate in any illegal actions.” (Genter and her partner are planning to get married in New York, which legalized same-sex marriages in June.)
“I was devastated,” Genter told Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ronnie Polaneczky. “I was crying. I called her a bigot; I told her, ‘I am a happy person and you are a miserable person.’ Then she hung up on me.”
When Polaneczky followed up with Donna, she was told that Genter’s replacement of the word “groom” with “partner” on the customer-information sheet was a deliberate provocation in an effort “to show that she’s different.” The manager then went on to define lesbians as women who are experimenting with other women because “men can be difficult.”
Apparently Donna has been “persuaded” by a bad Yelp review from Genter to meet with her parents “to try to smooth things over.”
