The Washington Post afforded Red Hen restaurant owner Stephanie Wilkinson what amounted to a full page of free advertisement on Tuesday, allowing her to tell Post readers all about the terrible struggle and glorious triumph she’s experienced since denying White House press secretary Sarah Sanders a table last June.
“I’ve been getting hate mail for almost a year now, ever since I asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to leave my Lexington, Va., restaurant, the Red Hen, last June,” Wilkinson writes. “At the time, the country was in turmoil over the Trump administration’s heinous practice of separating children from their parents at our southern border. In our tiny 26-seat restaurant, the horror felt simultaneously immediate and far away.
“Faced with the prospect of serving a fine meal to a person whose actions in the service of our country we felt violated basic standards of humanity, we balked. We couldn’t do it,” she explained.
Now, one might hope that with a year’s worth of reflection and soul searching, Wilkinson might have had an insight or two. She might have read news reports that let her know that the Obama administration engaged in family separations as well. She might have realized that we have laws at the border that we have to enforce if we don’t want utter chaos. She might have examined her motivations and understood, at long last, that she had been carried away by the atmosphere of “resistance” that was polluting the country. She might have emerged chagrined, a little embarrassed, and yet infinitely wiser. That, we could have respected.
But those hopes would be in vain.
“After nearly a year, I’m happy to say that business is still good,” she boasts. “Better than good, actually. And besides the boost to our area charities, our town’s hospitality and sales revenue have gone up, too.
“Our haters may have believed that there were more of ‘them’ than of ‘us,’ but it turns out we have more than enough to keep us cooking. And to everyone who might be fearful about taking a stand, I say don’t be. Resistance is not futile, for you or your business,” she concludes.
Well, we’ve never doubted for a moment that liberal morons will flock to support likeminded liberal morons, so none of that is very surprising. What is surprising – or, more accurately, dismaying – is that in all this time, you never had that epiphany that says: You know, what I did was really sort of childish and rude. And whether or not it juiced up all the Trump haters out there, it was beneath me as a business owner and a human being.
No, instead you seem to believe you actually accomplished something. That’s not irritating or enraging. It’s just kinda sad.
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