I don't necessarily think Sarah Huckabee Sanders should ever be turned away from a restaurant for being who she is, even though I believe she regularly dissembles on behalf of a cruel and inept administration. But then, I can't think of many instances where you ought to refuse service to someone who behaves in a civil fashion. Even if they are gay and you believe homosexuality is a sin, you should be willing to take their order.
But there is a difference between what people should do and what they have to do. We all have the right to be a jackass.
All we have to do is deal with the consequences.
The owner of the Red Hen understands this. And while she might have preferred the incident go unreported, everything outs in this social media era. Now the Red Hen has become another polarizing factor of American life. Some people will go out of their way to eat there. Others will vociferously complain and write mean reviews of the restaurant online.
We don't have to be nice to everyone. We can shun people we don't like, even if our reasons for not liking them are stupid. There are special cases where discrimination is against the law, but most of the time we are free to discriminate. Most of the time, discrimination is just the way we live our lives. We hang out with some people, other people we leave alone.
It's possible to be appalled by a person's politics while liking the person immensely. It's possible to be polite to people we think are horrible human beings. We all sometimes behave in ways that could be framed as hypocritical. Maybe you hate your boss' husband because he's a feckless boor. You are under no obligation to let her know you know this; you are free to smile, avoid the subject and assume she already knows. You can even pretend to be able to abide him. You can drink his whiskey, smoke his cigars, and nod while he drones on about John Galt and Ross Ulbricht.
We all have a lot of latitude when face-to-face with someone we dislike. Most of the time I try really hard to mask my dislike because I don't see how expressing it accomplishes anything. I don't want to hold up the line or make a scene or look like the jerk I have every right to be. I want people to think that I am a reasonable person with enough self-discipline to keep the social contract and observe decorum.
It is possible to go too far in this respect. There are times when I should have said to men (invariably it was men) who were saying sexist or racist things in a context where they thought they were safe to say them. Instead, I pretended not to hear them. And there are also times when I wished I'd ignored boorish remarks; I haven't hit anyone in a long time, but there have been a couple of times in the past 30 years when I've come close.
Bullies need to be called out, to be reminded that their actions are unacceptable--but it's probably better if we use our inside voice to do so.
I don't know Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but we have mutual friends. Some of them defend her, others worry about her. I don't think we need to worry about her.
For some--maybe most--people deeply invested in politics, a certain cynicism is the rule. I have always gotten along with and enjoyed Sanders' father, even though he sometimes acts cynically and violates his own best intuitions for the sake of his agenda. He sometimes says things he doesn't believe because he knows his constituents want to hear those things.
There's a quote regularly attributed to H.L. Mencken that holds "a professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man."
I don't think it's exactly what Mencken wrote. But in Mencken's posthumously published notebook Minority Report he did write this: "No professional politician can be quite honest, either with himself or with others. However lofty his intentions, he must get into office by abasing himself. Either he must knuckle down to the bosses, or he must court the mob."
That's probably fair. And while some of us would like to think we would never find ourselves in the position Sanders finds herself, most of us have to choke down a little unpleasantness to make a living too. I have declined jobs on ethical grounds and left money on the table in a couple of situations. But I've also compartmentalized and compromised my principles on occasion. In Texas, I ran a small chain of newspapers. Part of my job was establishing editorial pages for these newspapers and writing editorials that expressed the opinion of my publisher.
Often I didn't personally agree with these opinions--sometimes I pushed back a little and even convinced my publisher (who was open-minded and fair) to moderate his position. But most of the time I just did what I saw as my job and tried to express my publisher's ideas as well as they could be expressed.
And yeah, I can imagine a scenario where I would have refused to write a piece he wanted me to write, but that never happened. I didn't leave that job because I couldn't live with crafting editorials I didn't necessarily agree with, but because it turned out that small-town journalism is very hard to do well and I didn't like firing people. I didn't resign on principle.
I don't know what's in Sanders' heart, but I know she's not stupid and probably not overawed by her boss. I suspect she believes she's just doing her job.
I suspect she understands there are consequences.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 06/26/2018