Photo: Sign Spotted at Red Hen Reveals Their Truly Remarkable Hypocrisy
The liberal co-owner of the small restaurant known as the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, drew plenty of attention to herself and her establishment after she refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and her family on Friday because they disagreed politically.
The incident quickly became national news as it is just the latest example of how supposedly loving and tolerant leftists are in actuality quite hateful and intolerant toward their ideological opponents on the right in the Age of Trump.
But the utter hypocrisy of the liberal co-owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, was shown not simply by her actions that night, but also by a sign prominently displayed in a front window of the restaurant.
The small sign bore a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
https://twitter.com/DGP603/status/1010905886552985602
It would appear that the Red Hen was not serving up “love” on its menu Friday night — or anything else for that matter — with regard to the liberal co-owner’s political “enemy,” a representative of the Trump administration.
Wilkinson, who told The Washington Post about how she had pulled Sanders to the side for a private conversation in which she asked her to leave, could have handled the situation far differently from the way she did, though she insisted to The Post that she’d handle it the same if she had it to do over again.
She could have adopted the Democrats’ oft-stated, seldom-acted-upon mantra of 2016, “When they go low, we go high,” and taken the high road to serve her political “enemy” in hopes to transforming an opponent into a friend.
She could have shown that their political differences would not get in the way of the restaurant’s provision of polite and prompt service to a paying customer of the public.
Instead, she adopted the liberals’ post-Trump position of all-opposition, all-of-the-time and kicked Sanders and her family out of her restaurant … and later harassed and protested Sanders’ family as they dined at another restaurant.
The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher took note of the hypocritical display and asked, “Are we really going to be the kind of country in which businesses drive those whose politics offend them out of their premises? Are we really going to be the kind of country in which activists enter restaurants and drive particular customers out, because of their politics?”
That second question was in reference to how Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had been driven out of a D.C.-area Mexican restaurant over the weekend by a group of protesters who harassed her and other diners as they tried to eat.
Dreher’s piece noted that those sort of actions only help bolster support for President Donald Trump, as “Conservative people see this, and they imagine themselves being thrown out of a restaurant, either by the owner or by left-wing protesters, because they are conservative.”
“They see themselves being driven out of the public square by the left — which all the while congratulates itself on its superior morality — and it makes them furious,” especially now that a simple dinner out at a public restaurant has been transformed into a political battleground by the left.
As for the sign quoting King, Dreher wrote, “They don’t believe that at the Little Red Hen. They like to think they do, but they don’t.”
Indeed, the restaurant’s despicably intolerant actions in kicking Sarah Sanders and her family out over political differences prove that it didn’t actually abide by the sentiment expressed in that quote.
And the more liberals continue to display a similar intolerance toward their political “enemies” on the right, the less likely it will be for any common ground or friendship to be found in our coarsened society.
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