If you’re gay and you’d like to kiss, you probably don’t want to do it in an El Paso, Texas restaurant or in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Two gay men kissed in a Chico’s Taco restaurant in El Paso and their entire dinner party was tossed out because the management didn’t want that “faggoty stuff” in their eatery.  The restaurant claims that they can refuse service to anyone they want, however they forgot to check with their own city ordinance on the matter.

Briana Stone, a lawyer with the Paso del Norte Civil Rights Project …said the city anti-discrimination ordinance protects people on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation in public places. Perhaps more troubling, she said, was that the police officer chose not to enforce that ordinance and might have contributed to discrimination.

“This is such a blatant refusal to uphold the law on account of discrimination,” she said. “The result is devastating. The Police Department is allowing that and even participating in it by refusing to enforce an anti-discrimination ordinance, which is what their job is.”

Lisa Graybill, legal director for the ACLU of Texas, said that businesses can ask patrons to leave for lewd conduct, but that those standards would have to apply to all customers.

If they’re going to kick out gay couples for kissing, they’re going to have to kick out heterosexual couples as well.  The main problem with Chico’s, according to locals, is that it’s open 24 hours a day, has greasy, disgusting food, and is full of Cholo’s (soft core gang members) fresh from the border who are extremely homophobic.

In Salt Lake City, however, it gets a little murkier.  Apparently, church officials own part of the town square and can, thus, make “citizens arrests,” though arresting gay people for kissing or holding hands seems quite extreme.  They are also known for arresting people who are peacefully assembling and handing out christian leaflets, quite ironic since this is what Mormons do worldwide.

The kiss happened on a former public easement given up by city in 2003 in a controversial land-swap deal. The easement became private property, allowing the church to ban protesting, smoking, sunbathing and other “offensive, indecent, obscene, lewd or disorderly speech, dress or conduct,” church officials said at the time. In exchange, the city got church property for a west-side community center.

The men were eventually cited with trespassing on the plaza by the police.  However, the case makes little sense because, many times a day, people are seen kissing and hugging on the plaza.  The only difference, it seems, is that those people aren’t gay.  The church has not kept their promise to keep the area a public area and follow the law as it promised back in 2002.

This is the area in question.  More on the Main Street Plaza controversy.