The Masterpiece Cakeshop case had legal legs because Colorado has an anti-discrimination law that covers sexual orientation as a protected class in public accommodations.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service in a somewhat analogous way but there is no federal or Virginia state law barring discrimination in public accommodation* on the basis of political affiliation or political activity.
*Many more places do ban discrimination in employment based upon political affiliation or political activity. IMHO it would be a frightening thing for an employer to be able to legally fire someone based upon which political party the employee supports.
The restaurant isn’t barring Republicans. It is barring a public figure based on their job performance.
To use a different example, James Mitchell and Bruce Jensen were psychologists who wrote the book on CIA’s torture program. If they walked into a restaurant, and the owners and waitstaff felt it was immoral to serve them because they were responsible for a campaign of torture, you can’t claim they are being discriminated against because they are members of a certain party or voted a different way.
And a right that she appears to have a problem with. Of course, it’s also her right to say what she did. On a side note, it always annoys/amuses me when people don’t seem to understand that when they talk about freedom/rights, that also encompasses the right not to agree with you.
Like Lord Feldon said, she did not take the high road. If she wanted to take the high road she just would have walked out, maybe even argued back and forth a bit with the owner (IRL not online). Instead she tweeted to over over 3 million people that the restaurant she was at was disrespectful to her. She also knows full well it will be quickly retweeted (almost 50,000 times as of right now) and that many major media outlets are going to pick it up and report on it.
Then we have this gem from her dad:
Bigotry. On the menu at Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington VA. Or you can ask for the “Hate Plate”. And appetizers are “small plates for small minds”
I get that she was steamed about it. I’ll give her that if anyone else, not in the public eye did the exact same thing we probably wouldn’t be talking about this, but singling out one person and their livelihood and attempting to turn millions of people against them, that’s not the high road. That’s being a bit out of touch and not understanding that small little restaurant isn’t going to know what to do with that much attention. It could even put them out of business.
Look at Tomi, she had a drink thrown at her while out to eat with her family. She didn’t tweet about it or put it on facebook. From what I can quickly tell, everything she’s said about it was her just replying to others and she more or less said 'meh, it was wrong and shouldn’t have been done, but I can deal with it. no biggie" and moved on. (Though she probably likes the attention)
And to mention it again, she [Sanders] agrees that a business may deny service to someone that’s gay. Or deny service to someone due to their own religion. But has an issue with a business denying service to someone because of their politics.
Assuming you mean respect as in ‘they’re also allowed to do it’ not ‘you have to respect what other people say’, then yes. No one was attempting to take away her freedom of speech, but it should be noted that you don’t have freedom of speech on Twitter or in a restaurant.
TL;DR. Yes, she’s allowed to do what she did, but I’m curious why you feel she took the ‘high road’.
On preview I see what Ravenman said. That’s an interesting distinction. I’m curious what would have happened if they had asked a democrat that worked for Trump to leave. Sarah did specifically say she was asked to leave because she works for POTUS, so she wasn’t discriminated against because of her politics, but her employer.
I have to agree. But am concerned it will just make them double down.
We have to take the high road. As the saying goes, “Don’t wrestle a pig because you’ll just get muddy and the pig enjoys it.”
We must continue to call out this administrations lies and atrocities.
But I am afraid it’s not going to matter. Trump doesn’t care what his distractors think, and his supporters love that we are angry. The lies get more blatant every dam day. I don’t think that one of trumps supporters has changed their mind about him. This is what they voted for after all. They LIKE what he’s doing. This is troubling.
If he remains President, if he gets a second term, he will stop lying, and just try to imprison anyone that opposes him. He has already stated that he want’s to censure the media. His fans love this. It’s a dam good thing that we outnumber them (not by much I’m afraid. That stuns me).
We really, IMHO, have only two chances to bring this nightmare to an end.
Bob Mueller gets his man. How, I don’t know. Absolute proof of his crimes still may not remove him. His supporters will believe him when he says “That’s just good business, have you seen my apartment?”
Or -
The midterms are so overwhelmingly democratic in every state, that congress does it’s job and impeaches him. That’s sort of a sad outcome, because they will only do that to save their own skins.
The GOP is waiting for the midterms to decide what to do about this abomination.
Its not just that, there were several LGBT employees at the restaurant who didn’t feel comfortable serving SHS.
I’m kind of drawn. I know its a slippery slope and all, and we have laws because lots of white businesses didn’t want to serve blacks and jews in the past.
We can debate whether or not it was a good business decision to ask her to leave but they had every damn right to tell her to get lost. We need to drop the false equivalency and otherwise normalizing the Trump tribe. By virtue of Sanders’ position and her very special place in history, Sanders is going to be a disruption. Her very presence, the very sight of her, is going to be disruptive. Let’s not pretend that someone the owners were overreacting to a policy debate. They made a conscious decision not to allow the American version of Joseph Goebbels into their establishment.
It’s discouraging how often this simple concept has to be re-explained.
It’s also discouraging how often it needs to be re-explained that the concept of free speech limits the government’s ability to punish you for your speech but doesn’t mean private citizens can’t tell you to pound sand.
Sanders wasn’t kicked out over a disagreement over marginal tax rates or Social Security spending. She was kicked out for abetting a cruel policy and child abuse.
She’s not just an other; unlike ‘others’ she has real influence and power, and she incontrovertibly collaborating with people who are inflicting real pain and misery on thousands of human lives, and in doing so, also sending a message about the kind of social and political climate they’re trying to create. People have not only the right to challenge that; they have a responsibility.
I respect her right to be wrong. I’m not saying she’s not allowed to be wrong.
I’m saying she’s not allowed to be wrong on my property. I of course tolerate her right to be wrong while she’s standing on her property — or to be wrong while she’s standing on public property, or to be wrong while she’s standing on the property of anyone else who has no problem with that — but I of course have no problem telling her to get off my property if I think she’s being all wrong on it.
That’s just meaningless nonsense. It’s sometimes said that the right of free speech comes with the responsibility to understand that speech has consequences, but that’s not what’s primarily relevant here.
This seems to me to be a particularly clear-cut case of the right in a free country to express your displeasure with the government without fear of retribution from government authority. However, Sanders using her official White House account to name and berate the restaurant, presumably in the hope that Trumpists will organize a boycott, is uncomfortably close to exactly that kind of retribution and certainly seems unethical. She is free to natter about it all she wants as a private individual, not as press secretary.
There’s no indication that the restaurant owner wasn’t entirely polite in asking Sanders to leave, so why Sanders should make such a point of her own politeness is a mystery. And Sanders is the one who chose to take this public, using an official government channel to do so. That action says more about her than it does about the owner of the Red Hen.
This whole thread is rather bizarre, because I keep thinking how the OP stiffed a waitress on a tip because the hollandaise sauce wasn’t sufficiently lemony.
Perhaps your surprise is rooted in the false assumption of your last sentence. No, it does not. Free speech means you don’t use the arm of the state to silence those you disagree with. It does not mean you must supply someone a platform to speak or to respect what they say.
This is only analogous to the “gay wedding cake” case in a superficial way. The legal aspects have already been explained to you, but the moral issue is one that each of us has to decide individually. I, personally, would probably not have kicked her out of my restaurant, but the owners are perfectly free to follow their own conscience on the matter. And from a strictly business standpoint, it might have been a good thing to do. I guess we’ll find out shortly. VA can be a fairly conservative state, but Northern Virginia is quite liberal.
What seems to have been missed here is that according to the owner, the restaurant had LGBT staff who were not comfortable interacting with Sanders because of her defense of Trump’s actions on LGBT in the military. There may also have been other reasons they didn’t want her around; personally, I’d worry that my restaurant was perceived as a hangout for Trumpists.
In any case, the broad principle here is the right to express your displeasure with the government without fear of government retribution. But as I said, by naming and berating the restaurant through her official PressSec account, Sanders appears to have crossed that line and was probably at least guilty of ethics violations, which is pretty much a daily occurrence in that administration.