Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the Virginia restaurant responsible for kicking White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and her family out is stepping aside from leadership of Lexington, Virginia’s Main Street Program.
Main Street Lexington is like our own Cape Charles Main Street program, part of Virginia Main Street, an organization tasked with promoting economic viability across the state.
Elizabeth Outland Branner, the president of the organization, accepted Wilkinson’s resignation Tuesday morning, WSLS reported.
“Considering the events of the past weekend, Stephanie felt it best that for the continued success of Main Street Lexington, she should step aside,” Branner wrote in an email.
“This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals,” Stephani Wilkinson.
Her so-called morals are more in line with Robert DeNiro onstage at the Tony’s, shouting “F*** Trump.” Morality had nothing to do with this transplanted liberal New Yorker’s decision to reject Sanders and her party. Real morals would have been to serve people you may disagree with. Grotesque caricatures like Kathy Griffin and Peter Fonda will be making reservations to be sure.
On Sunday, Historic Downtown Lexington’s Facebook page was begging people not to condemn the town for the actions of Wilkinson:
We do not condone the actions of Stephanie Wilkinson, owner of the Red Hen Restaurant and Director of Main Street Lexington. The negative impact and nasty backlash towards our little community is downright appalling. Please do not condemn our town for one person’s actions. To The People, Mr. President Trump & Secretary Sarah Sanders we sincerely apologize for the poor behavior and decision of ONE PERSON!
Congressional Candidate Ben Cline was also quick to apologize:
On behalf of my hometown of Lexington, I want to apologize for the rudeness of one liberal New York transplant (who also happens to be Meryl Streep’s cousin). We hope you will come back and enjoy our area’s true southern hospitality.
Paul Plante says
Not to put too fine a point on it, but she didn’t “kick out” the family.
Here is the version of events as posted in the Washington Post:
THE WASHINGTON POST Avi Selk, Sarah Murray 24 JUNE 2018
It was important to Wilkinson, she said, that Sanders had already been served — that her staff had not simply refused her on sight.
And it was important to her that Sanders was a public official, not just a customer with whom she disagreed, many of whom were included in her regular clientele.
All the same, she was tense as she walked up to the press secretary’s chair.
“I said, ‘I’m the owner,’” she recalled,
”‘I’d like you to come out to the patio with me for a word.’”
They stepped outside, into another small enclosure, but at least out of the crowded restaurant.
“I was babbling a little, but I got my point across in a polite and direct fashion,” Wilkinson said.
“I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation.”
“I said, ‘I’d like to ask you to leave.’”
Wilkinson didn’t know how Sanders would react, or whether Trump’s chief spokeswoman had been called out in a restaurant before — as the president’s homeland security secretary had been days earlier.
Sanders’s response was immediate, Wilkinson said: ”‘That’s fine.'”
“‘I’ll go.’”
Sanders went back to the table, picked up her things and walked out.
The others at her table had been welcome to stay, Wilkinson said.
But they didn’t, so the servers cleared away the cheese plates and glasses.
“They offered to pay,” Wilkinson said.
“I said, ‘No.'”
“‘It’s on the house.’”
end quotes
Whether that is true or not, who knows, but that is what was reported.
T.G. Peranteau says
Washington Compost. LOL
tkenny says
Wayne, you might want to change the title of this, I have found no reference that she was kicked out of the Main Street Program. All sources I found said that she voluntarily resigned.
Knowing that she resigned puts a sightly different spin on your article – just a little more accuracy would be nice.
Note: But we all know what really happened, don’t we?
tkenny says
Wayne, I completely disagree – we don’t know what happened. It’s nothing more than innuendo on your part. The sad part is a majority of the people here don’t know the difference between a blog and news outlet and are going to believe she was kicked out.
She was the Director of the Main Street program – maybe she had enough sense and professionalism to realized that her sudden “fame” was going to impact the project’s success or her ability to effectively lead the project.
Paul Plante says
She is gone, tkenny.
That is what anybody would think after reading either blog or newspaper.
Does it really make any difference whatsoever how that happened?
Besides yourself, do you think anyone really cares?
Robert says
I have to disagree with what you said here. I do agree with Wayne’s headline. Situations such as this one arise all the time. For public consumption (I emphasize, for public consumption), Main Street Lexington not wishing to become any further embroiled in the controversy, Elizabeth Outland Branner was of course going to say that Stephanie Wilkinson voluntarily resigned her post as Executive Director.
Because similar situations arise all the time, I feel quite sure that Elizabeth Outland Branner, speaking on behalf of herself and the other members of the Board of Directors, told Stephanie Wilkinson to tender her resignation, which in my view, does boil down to being “kicked out”. Rather than fight it, Stephanie Wlkinson complied with their request and tendered her resignation. Thus, she resigned “voluntarily”.
Paul Plante says
She made herself a lightning rod for some reason known only to herself.
Whatever message she was trying to convey seems lost on most people I have talked with about what happened.
It appears that her waitstaff, who she says are “gay,” whatever that is supposed to mean in the restaurant trade, don’t like Sarah Sanders because they don’t think she likes “gay” people, so that is why Sarah had to leave.
Now, tkenny, you know the Constitution better than anybody, so you would be the first to know that thanks to the Supreme Court and Barack Obama, those “gay” folks are totally free to refuse service to anyone they choose to refuse it to, and so they were within their rights to refuse to serve Sarah Sanders.
But is that a message the Main Street Program would want to endorse, tkenny – that in Virginia, gay people now get to determine who can or cannot be served in a restaurant?
So the resignation was most likely a way for her to gracefully bow out without being thrown out herself.
Stuart Bell says
I can not understand why the men in her dinner party did not take care of this as it unfolded. I know I would have.
Paul Plante says
I’m frankly surprised that a noted ethologist and cultural anthropologist like our own tkenny is not jumping all over the various cultural cross-currents at play right here in this story.
First off, there is the transplanted New York liberal there in the hometown of Civil War hero “Stonewall” Jackson, which is a cultural clash in and of itself if there ever was one.
And then there are the “gay” waitstaff who get to determine who eats in Virginia and who doesn’t.
And that is only the start according to the Washington Post article “Outside the Red Hen, fire and ire on social media come to life” by Gregory S. Schneider on 27 June 2018, as follows:
LEXINGTON, Va. —America broke out Tuesday afternoon in this small Shenandoah Valley town.
end quotes
That, people, is an understatement.
The article continues as follows:
Four days after the owner of the Red Hen restaurant stirred national debate by asking White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave her establishment, all the fire and ire of social media was made flesh at the corners of Washington and Randolph streets.
The quaint red restaurant, its dirty green awnings made famous by a disapproving tweet Monday from President Trump, was scheduled to open for dinner service at 5 p.m.
end quotes
Now, to be truthful, that is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, because his fancy Mar-A-Lago resort had a dirty kitchen too, and his hotels appear to be plagued with bedbugs, which is some more cultural drama one would think a distinguished cultural scientist like tkenny would be all over, so his silence is surprising.
Getting back to the cultural drama, because it gets better and better as the minutes roll by here, we have:
Protesters began showing up around 3.
At first, it was just two guys holding Trump banners, a Confederate flag and a Corey Stewart for U.S. Senate sign.
Standing in a steady rain, mobbed by three or four TV crews who had been stationed across from the darkened restaurant since morning, the pair said they were there to call for civility.
“Just to let these people know that we don’t appreciate their communism and their kicking out our public servant,” said Chris Wayne, 35, of Monterey, a mountain hamlet about an hour north of Lexington.
Wayne gave his occupation as “vigilante” — he pointed to the “VGL-NTE” license plates of his red Ford Super Duty pickup — and said that “politics shouldn’t decide whether you can eat dinner or not.”
It’s a shame what’s happened to Lexington, said his companion, Grayson Jennings, 66, a retired contractor and member of the Virginia Flaggers Confederate heritage group.
“It’s lost its way.”
“There are too many come-heres and transplants and carpetbaggers,” he said.
end quotes
Now, that is real dialogue from real people, not something cooked up by some political speechwriter, and those old boys are putting it on the line as they see it, which is as much their God-given right in America as it is the right of the gay waitstaff to refuse to serve Sarah Sanders, so we can see some cultural balance developing here.
Getting back to the story:
Lexington is home to two universities — Washington & Lee and the Virginia Military Institute — and has long been more liberal than surrounding Rockbridge County.
Lexington went for Hillary Clinton in 2016; Rockbridge went for Trump.
But not since the city eliminated Confederate flags from municipal poles in 2011 has it seen anything stir public passion like the Red Hen incident.
“One thing this town is, it’s always been polite and nice,” said Doug Harwood, 65, publisher of the Rockbridge Advocate, a monthly magazine whose slogan is “Independent as a Hog on Ice.”
As Tuesday afternoon wore on, though, the flagpole issue began to seem tame.
More protesters joined the Confederate guys, who had moved onto the sidewalk in front of the still-dark Red Hen restaurant.
“Don’t eat at the commie cluck,” read one woman’s hand-lettered poster.
A couple of passing motorists honked or yelled “Trump!”
A Volvo driver shouted “Booo!”
One guy offered a heartfelt, “Who cares?”
end quotes
Somehow, I find myself more in tune with that last dude there, but hey, that is just me, and to each is own, as we will further see by returning to the action as follows:
The commotion was unusual for Lexington in the summer, when college is out.
But it grew even louder as the crowd thickened.
A man in a green hat and black shirt went up to the Confederate guys and yelled in their faces: “Trump is a chump!”
Asked by a reporter to identify himself, the man declined — and offered a business card for the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Two women and a man showed up with a bullhorn, holding signs with harsh anti-gay messages.
The Red Hen’s owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, in her only interview over the weekend, had told The Washington Post that several of her staffers were gay and were uncomfortable serving Sanders because she defended Trump’s desire to ban transgender people from the military.
The group with the bullhorn seized on that.
“This town is full of people who don’t know Jesus Christ and rebel against Jesus Christ through their sins,” shouted Dianna Orea, 50.
Saying she was from Michigan but traveled the country preaching, she held a sign that said “LGBT — Let God Burn Them.”
Her companion, Edgar Orea, began railing against “Sodomites.”
Wayne and Jennings, the Confederate flaggers, quickly crossed the street to get away from the anti-gay sloganeers.
“We don’t want anything to do with that crazy religious bigot stuff,” Wayne said.
end quotes
You’ve got to admit, those Confederate dudes come across as quite dignified there.
But there’s more yet:
Nearby, in front of the house where Stonewall Jackson once lived, postal worker Jamie Nuckols began shouting back at Edgar Orea.
“I support homosexuals!”
“I support gay people!” she said.
“Homosexuals are destroying America!” Edgar Orea bellowed back on the bullhorn.
Soon, the police showed up to tell Orea he could yell, but he was going to have to put down the bullhorn.
A ponytailed man came up with a bucket of chicken manure and dumped it on the corner in front of the Red Hen and was promptly arrested.
More patrol cars arrived and blocked off the street in the town of 7,000.
By now several would-be diners had arrived, hoping to eat in the restaurant, which was still dark.
Several local merchants said they hadn’t spoken with Wilkinson since the weekend.
By midafternoon, Wilkinson sent notice that she was resigning her position as executive director of the downtown business association.
Word spread that the restaurant might not reopen for another month.
Kim Pettus, 55, of Richmond, stood in front of the door grinning in amazement at the spectacle of protest unfolding around him.
He and his wife had driven nearly two hours to have dinner in a show support for Wilkinson and the restaurant, he said.
As an African American, Pettus said he was proud of her defiance.
He was not pleased as 5 o’clock came and went.
“So all these Confederates got them to close till July 5?” he said.
Dianna Orea turned toward him.
“America is going to hell,” she said, “and we need people to repent and follow Jesus Christ.”
On Pettus’s other side, Carolyn Eliott, 77, looked a bit bewildered.
A lifelong Lexington resident, she was offended that the Red Hen would turn away anyone.
“There’s no reason they couldn’t have been served,” the retired schoolteacher said.
“I’m so sorry that we’ve gotten such bad publicity.”
“We’ve been a very quiet little country town until this happened.”
Next to her, Pettus and Dianna Orea were still going at it.
“All you guys are frauds,” Pettus said.
“You’re a liar,” she shot back.
The rain had stopped, half a dozen police cars sat at either end of the block and some 75 people stood in a broad circle, facing each other between the restaurant and the Stonewall Jackson house.
No one seemed to know what to do next.
Off to the side, Jim Belcher, 61, stood watching in a U.S. Air Force Veteran cap.
He shook his head.
“It’s kind of like this country right now, when you think about it,” he said.
“I look at this whole thing and I think, where are the manners?”
“Where is the respect?”
“. . . It’s sad.”
end quotes
Now, there is a dude with his finger on the pulse of things here in America!
And here is another dude with his feet on the ground, which is a comfort to know:
A few blocks away, Tracy Parker was gathering parts in his auto shop.
The front of his Ballard & Parker Service Center was festooned with Trump banners, but Parker laughed when asked about the Red Hen incident.
He didn’t much care about the restaurant owner’s politics, he said.
It just didn’t make sense to him to turn away a paying customer.
“I have people come in here all the time with Obama stickers on their cars and I wouldn’t turn them away,” he said.
“The lady next door” — he gestured over at the Rockbridge Music shop — “she’s all about Hillary Clinton. . . .”
“But I’ve worked on her car for years.”
“What can I say?”
“It’s just a difference of opinion.”
Diana Schofield, the owner of the music shop, laughed when told of Parker’s comment.
“I give him hell all the time about those signs,” she said.
“But those are great guys over there.”
“They work hard all the time.”
People need to learn how to talk about politics without being uncivil, she said.
She plays in bands with conservatives, she said; she had dinner just the other night with a hardcore Republican friend.
Still, she wasn’t prepared to condemn Wilkinson and what she did at the Red Hen last Friday night.
“It’s not really live and let live,” she said.
“I feel our current administration has really crossed lines on a lot of our rights as citizens.”
And all the attention that’s been focused on Lexington?
Maybe that’s not all bad.
“People sure know about us now,” she said.
“A small town in America.”
end quotes
Boy, they sure do!
Paul Plante says
Where but in America can you find all of that happening in the same place at the same time?
John Knuckston says
Ben Cline said it best – NY liberal transplant. They don’t learn, do they.
Lisa Hall says
So it is OK not to bake a wedding cake for a couple couple because of religious reasons, but not OK to ask someone to leave because of political or moral reasons? Why? I am really interested in polite discussion as I am trying to understand both sides of this issue.
Connie Davis says
As you are a Liberal, you would not understand.
Paul Plante says
In all seriousness, Lisa Hall, can irrational behavior by anyone be understood rationally?
Is there a rational explanation for behavior that does not seem rational?
What is the yardstick to measure by in either case, besides one that is totally arbitrary?
The woman who asked Sarah Sanders to leave did so for what she considered moral reasons to her.
There may not be another human being on the face of the earth who thinks or believes that there is any kind of moral reason for not serving Sarah Sanders, but it does not change the fact that for her, she had a moral reason.
The same with the baker.
Sorry, but that is the best I can do here.
Lori Evert says
Not the same. Sarah Sanders did not request the Red Hen employees to make her a dish proclaiming MAGA or anything having to do with her political beliefs. She simply ordered from the menu.
The baker refused to bake a product depicting the marriage of a gay couple. A huge difference. Secondly, the baker did not follow the couple to the next bakery and call upon friends to join him in protest, chanting anti-gay rhetoric. Sarah Sanders was asked to leave because she was recognized as being a Whitehouse employee. The gay couple were not asked to leave or told they wouldn’t be served, only that he wouldn’t bake a cake depicting a gay marriage. Had they ordered and been denied a cake not indicative of gay marriage, but solely because they were recognized as being a gay couple, it would be different.
Paul Plante says
And according to an article in THE HILL today entitled “Tourism officials boost marketing efforts in Va. town after Huckabee Sanders restaurant incident” by Brett Samuels on 3 September 2018, because of the very incident, which was a death blow to tourism in that area, a Virginia regional tourism board is now being forced to reshape its marketing efforts after protesters were drawn to the area because of controversy at The Red Hen restaurant, so this isn’t just local news, it is international news, and as THE HILL article proves, it still has legs and room to run.
According to THE HILL, the Roanoke Times reported Sunday that Rockbridge Regional Tourism – comprised of members from Lexington, Va., Buena Vista, Va., and Rockbridge County – decided to spend an additional $5,000 per month from July through September to try and attract more visitors.
The tourism office had to dip into its emergency funds for the boost, which localities reportedly decided was necessary after negative coverage from an incident at The Red Hen restaurant involving White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The restaurant, located in Lexington, Va., made national headlines after the owner refused to serve Sanders and her family.
“For a town our size, it was a significant impact,” Director of Marketing Patty Williams told The Roanoke Times.
Williams said the tourism office received thousands of emails and phone calls after the Red Hen controversy, including from some visitors who vowed never to come back to the region, The Roanoke Times reported.
end quotes
Talk about a small town being put on the national map, that is what Sarah Sanders accomplished for Lexington, Va. by getting her *** tossed out of the Red Hen this summer.
Getting back to THE HILL article, in addition to the funding, the tourism group is reportedly pulling together a survey to poll travelers on whether they recall The Red Hen incident and whether it would impact their decision to travel to the area in the future.
end quotes
HUH?
What on earth are they going to do that for?
Sounds kind of stupid to me, anyway, but then, I am not in any way involved with the tourist industry, so who knows what motivates their thinking.
What are they going to do when somebody answers “yes, I do recall that incident and no, because of it I am never coming back?”
Getting back to THE HILL:
Red Hen owner Stephanie Wilkinson told The Washington Post following the June incident that she asked Sanders to leave because the restaurant employs several LGBT employees, and Sanders’s defense of President Trump’s call to bar transgender people from the military was antithetical to her beliefs.
Sanders later tweeted about the episode from her government Twitter account, saying that she was asked to leave because she worked for Trump and that she departed the restaurant “politely.”
President Trump then lashed out at the restaurant via Twitter, calling the establishment “filthy.”
Protesters gathered outside the establishment in the days that followed, and some Republicans called for a boycott of the restaurant.
end quotes
Now, as to Trump calling her restaurant “filthy,” the dude should talk, because according to health department reports on line, his restaurants are filthy, too and his hotels have bedbugs.
Ray Otton says
And the question that no one’s addressed is why is there only one baker in the state of Colorado?
Blue Hoss says
I want to know how Minorities can change anything. I was raised that the Majority rules. It seems over the last 20 years Minorities dictate policy. It is a liberal wet dream……but I see light at the end of the tunnel. It will not end well for the left, once they have fully awakened a sleeping giant. The black folks coined a phrase and the rest of the world emulates them….It is ‘Woke’.
They better hope that sleeping giant does not get ‘Woke’. He will make BLM and AntiFa look like child’s play.
Paul Plante says
Last I looked, Hoss, the “sleeping giant” was pretty obese and didn’t look like it could get out of its own way, as well as being whacked out on oxycontin and fentanyl and heroin.
That is why it is called a “sleeping giant.”
It is a giant because it is so obese, and it is sleeping because of all the drugs.
Is it capable of being woke?
I wouldn’t put money on it, myself.
It’s pretty pathetic, actually.
Paul Plante says
Not a lot of people, apparently, and they don’t eat sweets or bread.
Blue Hoss says
I know some obese people who can shoot straighter than their skinny peers.
Paul Plante says
That reminds me of the obese dude in the Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0bl4O9Hj0w who shot a .50 caliber rifle at a steel plate downrange and had the ricochet almost go through his own fat head.
Now, there was a straight-shooting dude, alright.
Paul Plante says
Lisa Hall, with respect to polite discussion to help you try to understand both sides of this issue of “WHY it is OK not to bake a wedding cake for a couple because of religious reasons, but not OK to ask someone to leave because of political or moral reasons,” were you to consult p.147 of “The United States Supreme Court: The Pursuit of Justice” by Christopher Tomlins, this is what you would find written there concerning the United States Supreme Court, which I rank as one of the greatest dangers to our American life that there is, to wit:
THE FULLER COURT 1888-1910
Property and Liberty
Justice Melville Weston Fuller presided over a Court that has been accused of multiple failings.
No less an illustrious member than Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., criticized it for reading Social Darwinism into the Constitution in 1905.
end quotes
Now, it is very important to understand that no matter how whacky or totally insane some pronouncement of the Supreme Court might be, and “Social Darwinism” was about as whacky as they come, once that pronouncement is made, it become “law of the land,” like Rowe V. Wade, and thus binds future courts to some degree, unless they in turn refute or repudiate a prior decision and overturn it, which I don’t think has ever been done in the case of “Social Darwinism,” which is a belief system in the United States of America that white, wealthy, Anglo-Saxon Americans are biologically superior to other groups.
Said another way, Social Darwinism is a term scholars use to describe the practice of misapplying the biological evolutionary language of Charles Darwin to politics, the economy, and society.
As you will recall, in 1859, Charles Darwin wrote “On the Origin of Species,” wherein Darwin offered a revolutionary scientific theory: the process of evolution through natural selection, which that plants and animals evolve over time in nature as new species arise from spontaneous mutations at the point of reproduction and battle with other plants and animals to get food, avoid being killed, and have offspring.
And here is where it gets whacky, or insane: soon, some sociologists and others were taking up words and ideas which Darwin had used to describe the biological world, and they were adopting them to their own ideas and theories about the human social world.
The believed that the dictum “survival of the fittest” (a term coined not by Charles Darwin but by sociologist Herbert Spencer) meant that only the fittest should survive.
end quotes
Since homosexuals were considered to be unfit, it followed for Social Darwinism that they should not survive, so discrimination against them, rightly or wrongly, was institutionalized in America.
Despite changes to the law, that Social Darwinism mindset in America has not gone away.
Getting back to “Social Darwinism,” unlike Darwin, the sociologists and others who were pushing Social Darwinism were not biologists, and they were adapting and corrupting Darwin’s language for their own social, economic, and political explanations, and as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was criticizing it for in 1905, the Supreme Court was reading Social Darwinism into the United States Constitution where it still lurks to this day, despite the fact that during and after World War II, the arguments of Social Darwinists and eugenicists lost popularity in the United States due to their association with Nazi racial propaganda.
Which then takes us back to your quest for rationality here.
There isn’t any, Lisa Hall.
Treat as sane and rational anything the Supreme Court says at your peril, because it might be totally insane, but still law of the land, regardless.
Chas Cornweller says
At Lisa Hall; I see your point and I hear you. Unfortunately, if you have come here for a polite discussion and reasonable responses to your question…you have come to the wrong place. I find most of the comments here succinct in their brevity and lacking any sense of direction. You are painted either as a commie loving liberal or as the vanguard of upstate loving come-here’s. Good, honest, exchanges of points of view come here to die, I am sorry to say. But, I do take your point as very interesting. A question I have asked myself.
Yes, why is it that some businesses can deny others on religious grounds, but uphold a moral stance and it becomes vilified by the very same who uphold bans? I believe that there are some, who like the Klan of old, hide behind their church and the anonymity of their stay-at-home computers, who are more likely to spew their venom at others they neither understand or care to understand. Sad part is, they are very, very likely to have those very same folks they hate so much, in their own families, as uncles, or aunts or brothers or sisters. Or perhaps, even their own children, which makes this situation even sadder.
Frankly, I am sick and tired of the lies and misdirection emulating from the highest seat of power in this once great nation. Our president is a moron and is very much on a path of de-constructing the very essence of democracy and freedom we once enjoyed and shared (to some degree – many were left out of that process). The wealthy will continue to grow, while the poor will increase in number. The middle class has lost its protectorate and is quickly ebbing away. For poor little Miss Condescension and her ilk to feel the pain and the wrath of the very people they are threatening, is small conciliation to folks like me. It is but the tip of the iceberg that is coming, if the ship of state doesn’t change course.
Paul Plante says
Ah, Chas Cornweller, what a disservice you do to yourself and tkenny when you say good, honest, exchanges of points of view come here to die.
Why do you belittle yourself so?
Mike Kuzma, Jr. says
Chas is a liberal, Paul and conversation is only conversation when one totally lockstep agrees with liberals.
Any other ideas are obviously racist.
In the future, when conversing with a liberal, simply pretend one is talking to a rock. The effect and impact of one’s words are the same, and it is less frustrating.
Lisa Hall, presume for the sake of conversation that you make macramé hanging designs. You have a standard set of designs but will also do special requests. You are requested to make a design that says “Gays must D!@”. You refuse on moral grounds. Perfectly fine, I support your conscience.
The next day, someone comes in and orders one of your standard designs. You say “Nope no nuh uh cuz you work for the White House and I hate the president”. Not okay.
One requires you to expend special efforts on a design you find abhorrent and against your moral stance. The other is a denial of service that you extend to any one walking off the street.
It is very easy to see unless you belong to a political party that abjures the individual and worships the State.
Paul Plante says
Lisa Hall, I am one of those old-fashioned Americans who believes that if you want to know the reasoning of the United States Supreme Court on anything, then the best thing to do is to go right to the source itself, which is the Supreme Court decision in question, in this case MASTERPIECE CAKESHOP, LTD., ET AL., PETITIONERS v. COLORADO CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION, ET AL. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE COURT OF APPEALS OF
COLORADO, June 4, 2018, to wit:
Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd., is a Colorado bakery owned and operated by Jack Phillips, an expert baker and devout Christian.
In 2012 he told a same-sex couple that he would not create a cake for their wedding celebration because of his religious opposition to same-sex marriages—marriages that Colorado did not then recognize—but that he would sell them other baked goods, e.g., birthday cakes.
end quotes
There is a pertinent point I don’t think was covered in any press reports, which is why I take anything the press says about a Supreme Court case with a huge grain of salt.
Getting back to the synopsis:
The couple filed a charge with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (Commission) pursuant to the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA), which prohibits, as relevant here, discrimination based on sexual orientation in a “place of business engaged in any sales to the public and any place offering services . . . to the public.”
Under CADA’s administrative review system, the Colorado Civil Rights Division first found probable cause for a violation and referred the case to the Commission.
The Commission then referred the case for a formal hearing before a state Administrative Law Judge (ALJ), who ruled in the couple’s favor.
In so doing, the ALJ rejected Phillips’ First Amendment claims: that requiring him to create a cake for a same-sex wedding would violate his right to free speech by compelling him to exercise his artistic talents to express a message with which he disagreed and would violate his right to the free exercise of religion.
end quotes
Now, regardless of what the media might be saying, and that could be anything, since the media is not required to print either truth or fact, that is what really underlies this case, and that is what differentiates it, as well, in my opinion, from the Red Hen matter – the exercise of his artistic talents in the one case, creating something that did not previously exist, versus serving someone off the same menu everyone else would select items from.
Seems apples and oranges to me, anyway.
As to the Supreme Court decision, this is what is states:
Held: The Commission’s actions in this case violated the Free Exercise Clause. Pp. 9–18.
(a) The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression.
See Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. ___, ___.
end quotes
If there is to be an argument here as to the differences between the bakery case and the Red Hen case, there is what it must be around – in the one case, religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage being protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression vs. simply not serving someone off the same menu as everyone else because you don’t like them, which I think is made clear in this next section of that decision, to wit:
While it is unexceptional that Colorado law can protect gay persons in acquiring products and services on the same terms and conditions as are offered to other members of the public, the law must be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion.
To Phillips, his claim that using his artistic skills to make an expressive statement, a wedding endorsement in his own voice and of his own creation, has a significant First Amendment speech component and implicates his deep and sincere religious beliefs.
His dilemma was understandable in 2012, which was before Colorado recognized the validity of gay marriages performed in the State and before this Court issued United States v. Windsor, 570 U. S. 744, or Obergefell.
Given the State’s position at the time, there is some force to Phillips’ argument that he was not unreasonable in deeming his decision lawful.
State law at the time also afforded storekeepers some latitude to decline to create specific messages they considered offensive.
Indeed, while the instant enforcement proceedings were pending, the State Civil Rights Division concluded in at least three cases that a baker acted lawfully in declining to create cakes with decorations that demeaned gay persons or gay marriages.
Phillips too was entitled to a neutral and respectful consideration of his claims in all the circumstances of the case. Pp. 9–12.
(b) That consideration was compromised, however, by the Commission’s treatment of Phillips’ case, which showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection.
As the record shows, some of the commissioners at the Commission’s formal, public hearings endorsed the view that religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain, disparaged Phillips’ faith as despicable and characterized it as merely rhetorical, and compared his invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust.
No commissioners objected to the comments.
Nor were they mentioned in the later state-court ruling or disavowed in the briefs filed here.
The comments thus cast doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the Commission’s adjudication of Phillips’ case.
end quotes
There is much more to that decision, but I am going to stop here for the moment to let this be absorbed.
Paul Plante says
Getting back to the Supreme Court decision in MASTERPIECE CAKESHOP, LTD., ET AL., PETITIONERS v. COLORADO CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION, ET AL. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE COURT OF APPEALS OF COLORADO, June 4, 2018, Lisa Hall, so you can see that our dear friend and fellow American patriot Chas Cornweller was just joshing with you in a good natured way when he said good, honest, exchanges of points of view come here to die, which is not at all true, as you and I are proving right now, the decision goes on to say as follows:
Another indication of hostility is the different treatment of Phillips’ case and the cases of other bakers with objections to anti-gay messages who prevailed before the Commission.
The Commission ruled against Phillips in part on the theory that any message on the requested wedding cake would be attributed to the customer, not to the baker.
Yet the Division did not address this point in any of the cases involving requests for cakes depicting anti-gay marriage symbolism.
end quotes
Now, here I have to go back and say that with respect to the Red Hen incident, nobody has definitively said she did anything wrong.
Sarah Sanders to my knowledge never filed any kind of discrimination case against the owner of the Red Hen, although she could have, I suppose, especially of she were gay, so all you have are a bunch of different opinions.
That is what serves to differentiate the two cases in my mind.
Getting back to the Supreme Court:
The Division also considered that each bakery was willing to sell other products to the prospective customers, but the Commission found Phillips’ willingness to do the same irrelevant.
end quotes
Here we are dealing with a supposed “civil rights” commission in Colorado acting in a very blatant discriminatory manner towards the beliefs of the baker, which takes us back to the decisio9n, as follows:
The State Court of Appeals’ brief discussion of this disparity of treatment does not answer Phillips’ concern that the State’s practice was to disfavor the religious basis of his objection. Pp. 12–16.
(c) For these reasons, the Commission’s treatment of Phillips’ case violated the State’s duty under the First Amendment not to base laws or regulations on hostility to a religion or religious viewpoint.
The government, consistent with the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise, cannot impose regulations that are hostile to the religious beliefs of affected citizens and cannot act in a manner that passes judgment upon or presupposes the illegitimacy of religious beliefs and practices. Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U. S. 520.
Factors relevant to the assessment of governmental neutrality include “the historical background of the decision under challenge, the specific series of events leading to the enactment or official policy in question, and the legislative or administrative history, including contemporaneous statements made by members of the decisionmaking body.” Id., at 540.
In view of these factors, the record here demonstrates that the Commission’s consideration of Phillips’ case was neither tolerant nor respectful of his religious beliefs.
The Commission gave “every appearance,” id., at 545, of adjudicating his religious objection based on a negative normative “evaluation of the particular justification” for his objection and the religious grounds for it, id., at 537, but government has no role in expressing or even suggesting whether the religious ground for Phillips’ conscience-based objection is legitimate or illegitimate.
The inference here is thus that Phillips’ religious objection was not considered with the neutrality required by the Free Exercise Clause.
The State’s interest could have been weighed against Phillips’ sincere religious objections in a way consistent with the requisite religious neutrality that must be strictly observed.
But the official expressions of hostility to religion in some of the commissioners’ comments were inconsistent with that requirement, and the Commission’s disparate consideration of Phillips’ case compared to the cases of the other bakers suggests the same. Pp. 16–18.
end quotes
For those reasons, the discriminatory ruling of the so-called Colorado civil rights commission was reversed, as it well should have been.
Hope this helps you out, and Happy Independence from Tyranny Day!
Paul Plante says
And let me take a stab in the dark here, Lisa Hall, as to what some of this controversy might be about, and it does go back to tyranny, and a system that appears to be teetering out of balance here, where some segment of the population that calls itself “gay,” whatever on earth that is supposed to mean to anyone, is trying to impose itself and its views on people who do not wish to associate with those people.
Myself, for instance.
I’m over seventy years old, and I don’t wish for anyone of any sexual persuasion, gay, straight, bent to the left, twisted to the right, whatever, getting in my face to jam their sexual beliefs and sexual preferences and sexual practices down my throat, and that is what underlies the Red Hen case, as I see it, because the only reason the owner got involved was because in her words, her waitstaff is “gay,” and they didn’t want to serve Sarah Sanders because of what they perceive to be anti-gay bias on her part, which may or may not be true, but who knows.
Here is what the Washington Post says about it in the article “The owner of the Red Hen explains why she asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave” by Avi Selk and Sarah Murray on 24 June 2018, if you can believe a word they print:
LEXINGTON, Va. — Stephanie Wilkinson was at home Friday evening — nearly 200 miles from the White House — when the choice presented itself.
Her phone rang about 8 p.m.
It was the chef at the Red Hen, the tiny farm-to-table restaurant that she co-owned just off Main Street in this small city in the western part of the state.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders had just walked in and sat down, the chef informed her.
“He said the staff is a little concerned.”
“What should we do?” Wilkinson told The Washington Post.
“I said I’d be down to see if it’s true.”
It seemed unlikely to her that President Trump’s press secretary should be dining at a 26-seat restaurant in rural Virginia.
But then, it was unlikely that her entire staff would have misidentified Sanders, who had arrived last to a table of eight booked under her husband’s name.
As she made the short drive to the Red Hen, Wilkinson knew only this:
She knew Lexington, population 7,000, had voted overwhelmingly against Trump in a county that voted overwhelmingly for him.
“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” Wilkinson said.
“I have a business, and I want the business to thrive.”
“This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”
When she walked into the restaurant, Wilkinson saw that there had been no mistake.
The Red Hen is no bigger than some apartments, and the group table was impossible to miss: Sanders in a black dress, her husband, three or four men and women of roughly similar ages, and an older couple.
“They had cheese boards in front of them,” Wilkinson said.
Like any other family.
The kitchen was already preparing the party’s main course.
Wilkinson interrupted to huddle with her workers.
Several Red Hen employees are gay, she said.
“Tell me what you want me to do.”
“I can ask her to leave,” Wilkinson told her staff, she said.
“They said ‘yes.’”
end quotes
I think that is an important point that has gotten lost in the discussion, the WHY of why the Red Hen owner did what she did.
As I say above, I am old and am probably looked at as being reactionary in my views of what America is, but this takes me back in time in America to February 18, 1788, and the famous “Elihu” Political Essay, wherein was stated as follows:
The mind is free; it may be convinced by reasoning, but cannot be compelled by laws or constitutions, no, nor by fire, faggot, or the halter.
end quotes
Is the mind really free, Lisa Hall, when to get served in a public restaurant, you have to profess that you are for people being “gay,” whatever on earth being “gay” is all about?
Why is this thing of being “gay” being jammed in everybody’s faces in America these days?
Why do we need to know the Red Hen waitstaff are “gay?”
What has that got to do with anything being served to the public in a public restaurant?
If you want to be “gay.” whatever that might mean, then by all means, in your private time, have at it, but please, don’t jam it in my face when I am trying to eat, it is quite discourteous, thank you very much!
(See what I mean about being reactionary)