The Washington Post editorial board disagreed with the owner of a restaurant in Virginia who asked White House Press Secretary Sanders to leave simply because she worked for President Trump.
Sanders was dining with several people at the Red Hen in Lexington, Va. on Friday night after employees objected to Sanders’ defense of Trump’s transgender policy as well as the administration’s border policy. The owner spoke with Sanders, who then agreed to leave the restaurant. Sanders then tweeted about the incident sparking outrage across America for the treatment she received.
Th Post’s editorial board wrote that Sanders deserved to eat in peace, but took a few digs at the president at the same time.
Most obviously, passions are running high. Those who defend the Red Hen staff, or Ms. Nielsen’s hecklers, say this is no ordinary policy dispute. Mr.?Trump has ordered terrible violations of human rights at the border, he is demonizing immigrants by his actions and his rhetoric, and people need to speak up however they can.
They will get no argument from us regarding Mr.?Trump’s border policy, and when it comes to coarsening the debate, he is the prime offender. The poisonous fruits could be seen, as it happens, Saturday morning in a vile tweet from Ms. Sanders’s father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, that associated House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, with the vicious MS-13 gang.
We nonetheless would argue that Ms. Huckabee, and Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Miller, too, should be allowed to eat dinner in peace. Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?
Down that road lies a world in which only the most zealous sign up for public service. That benefits no one.
The Sanders episode was mild compared to what Department of Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House senior adviser Stephen Miller experienced last week while eating at different Mexican restaurants in D.C.
A heckler called Miller a “fascist” while he was eating dinner and Nielsen was confronted by a mob from Democratic Socialists of America and was forced to leave the restaurant she was dining at.
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