Embrace Gets Gay Couple Booted from NYC Cab

A gay couple got tossed out of a taxi in New York after the cabbie spied them hugging in the back of his vehicle.

A Nov. 4 article in The New York Post reported that Paul Bruno, 27, and his boyfriend took a cab on Nov. 2, but didn't make it to their destination; the driver, Medhat Mohamed, ordered them out, Bruno said, telling them, "You guys have to get out of the taxi! Hugging is not allowed in here!"

Said Bruno, "I was shocked," said Bruno, 27, who called the act "discrimination against homosexuals.... To pull over after two blocks and be so blatantly intolerant is outrageous. He needs to exercise the rules in which he was employed a little more closely."

The article said that "service refusals" can be costly, because cabbies can be fined for denying rides to passengers. A third strike can even result in the loss of a cabbie's license.

Some Muslim cabbies might refuse passengers accompanied by dogs for religious reasons--even service dogs, which aid the blind, the deaf, and others.

Said Bruno, "I don't know if it was a personal or religious thing. But it's never OK to deny anyone a ride, especially when it's such blatant and direct discrimination.... He's in the wrong place and in the wrong line of work if he doesn't have an open and tolerant attitude. I've seen a lot more go on in taxis than hugging."

The city's Taxi and Limousine Commission spokesperson Allan Fromberg told the Post that the commission "would take such an allegation very seriously and fully investigate."

A similar incident took place in Minneapolis back in 2005. As reported in an About.com blog on atheism and agnosticism, a cabbie, who was thought to be Muslim, ordered a trio of gay men out of his cab after he saw one man give one of the others a kiss. At that point, one of the men said, the driver lashed out at them verbally, "making statements like he can't be surrounded by people like us--it was against his religion," and told the men to "'Burn in hell,' 'Go to hell.'"

Wrote the blog's author, "Most religions condemn atheism... but cab drivers can't refuse to give rides to atheists. There's a good chance that this particular cab driver is Muslim, so what if he had kicked someone out because they were obviously a devout Jew? Such bigotry would probably be condemned by more people than the same bigotry against gays."