25 June 2018 — 0240 mdt
The Red Hen restaurant’s owner is a left wing social vigilante
who should not have denied service to Sarah Sanders
Despite being a preacher’s kid, White House Press Secretary Sarah Saunders effortlessly bears false witness in the service of her President, Donald Trump, a man for whom the truth is an option, not an obligation. Her defense of Trump has earned her many friends on the political right, and many enemies on the political left.
On Friday, Sanders and friends chose to dine at the Red Hen, in Lexington, VA. That, reports the Washington Post’s Mary Jordan, didn’t go well:
She had been out for dinner with friends, the cheese course already on the table, when the owner took her aside and requested that she leave. The owner said she thinks that Sanders works for and defends an “inhumane and unethical” administration.
For a more detailed account of how and why Sanders was politely kicked out of the Red Hen, see The owner of the Red Hen explains why she asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave, by WP reporters Avi Selk and Sarah Murray. Axios also has part of the backstory.
Sanders and her friends were not raising a ruckus. They weren’t being rowdy. They weren’t standing on chairs haranguing the other customers with quotes from Chairman Trump. They weren’t denouncing the staff as perverts. They were, by all accounts, simply there for a quiet meal and not misbehaving.
But the Red Hen’s staff disapproved. They served Sanders a cheese board, but called a co-owner, who drove to the restaurant, caucused with the staff, and then gave Sanders the heave-ho not for her conduct at the Red Hen, but for her conduct at the White House.
Sanders’ eviction was civil, but no less outrageous than the 1964 eviction of three customers from Atlanta’s Pickrick Restaurant by a future governor of Georgia:
Mr. Maddox first came to national attention in 1964, after he violated the newly signed federal Civil Rights Act by refusing to serve three black Georgia Tech students at his Pickrick Restaurant. The Pickrick was noted for the quality of its fried chicken and for its reasonable prices, but Mr. Maddox was determined that no black should experience the ambience that he had reserved exclusively for whites.
When the three black men tried to buy some of his chicken in July 1964, Mr. Maddox waved a pistol at them and said: “You no good dirty devils! You dirty Communists!”
Some of his customers were sympathetic to his cause and interrupted their meal to take pick handles that Mr. Maddox had put by the door (and sold for $2 apiece) to make it clear that the blacks would not be served. The pick handles, which Mr. Maddox also sold in his souvenir shop, were called ‘‘Pickrick drumsticks’’ and came to symbolize his resistance to the civil rights movement. On occasion, Mr. Maddox would autograph the handles.
Red Hen owner Stephanie Wilkinson occupies a political pole diametrically opposed to the one Maddox occupied, but she shares with the dead fried chicken entrepreneur a disdain for the principle of nondiscrimination in public accommodations, and a willingness to undertake vigilante action to punish people for their political views or personal characteristics by refusing them service.
Whether Wilkinson violated Sander’ civil rights is a matter of some dispute (a surprise to me; I think it’s discrimination as well as self-indulgent and boorish). Democrats and leftists fed up with the Trump administration’s policies and prevarications are high-fiving each other, especially on Facebook and Twitter, delirious with glee that a hypocrite has been humiliated with poetic justice. They’re unable to set aside their loathing of Sanders and Trump while they examine the civil rights and civil liberties implications of her ouster from the Red Hen.
Maryland Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings, and former Obama communications guru David Axlerod do understand that Sanders’ comeuppance comes at an unaffordable cost:
David Axelrod, a key architect of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, tweeted that he disagreed with those cheering the restaurant’s eviction of Sanders. “I am kind of amazed and appalled by the number of folks on Left who applauded the expulsion,” he tweeted. “This, in the end, is a triumph for @realDonaldTrump vision of America: Now we’re divided by red plates & blue plates! #sad.”
He’s right. Wilkinson, her restaurant staff, and all others who disapprove of Trump and Sanders, need to remember that we settle our political disagreements by casting votes at the polls and in our legislatures, and not by breaking hard rolls on the skulls of the people with whom we disagree.
Sarah should have been served, allowed to stay, and treated with decency and respect.