(OPINION) A street preacher in Waunakee, Wisconsin, is claiming a Subway employee refused to serve him this week after he walked into the sandwich shop wearing a T-shirt with brightly colored text describing homosexuality as “sin.”
Rich Penkoski, the leader of an online organization called Warriors for Christ, explained to The Christian Post he is considering a lawsuit against the Connecticut-based restaurant chain after he was allegedly refused service, based on video footage circulating on X.
In the video, the Subway staffer admitted she was denying service to Penkoski over “a personal matter.”
Penkoski said when he and and the three men with him — each wearing a different T-shirt emblazoned with provocative wording about spiritual salvation, sexuality, and abortion — the employee at the quick-service eatery said she is “not serving these guys.”
Leftist Karen refuses to serve Christians for wearing a Christian shirt. @SUBWAY Wanaukee Wisconsin. 608 268-1494 We can't refuse service to alphabet mafia, but they can refuse us? 😡👹 pic.twitter.com/WNzj6935nC
— Lexit (@LexitMovement1) July 17, 2024
“And there was a customer in front of us, and she said to him, ‘Are you with these gentlemen?’” Penkoski recalled. “He looked back at us and goes, ‘I’m not sure these are gentlemen.’ So I took out my phone and I told the pastor sitting next to me, I said, ‘They just refused service to us!’”
The Subway worker apparently stated it was because of Penkoski’s T-shirt that she denied him service. The shirt bore the words, “Homo sex is sin,” with a reference to Romans 1 beneath the neon yellow lettering.
The T-shirt was likely a reference to Romans 1:24-27, in which the Apostle Paul wrote:
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. (NIV)
