Sarah Sanders kicked out of Virginia Restaurant

[_EAllusion]

Well, Ajax is a literal white supremacist. He's a Nazi sympathizer. That's not an exaggeration. There's a clear trail of his posts on Stormfront showing just that. The fact that the Trump presidency has him over the moon with glee should be a neon warning sign to others.

Trump supporters, though, come in all manner of varieties. He's got a hardcore white supremacist backing, and an even larger group of voters who are motivated, to varying extents, by racial resentment. But he's also got voters from all walks of life who don't have anything to do with that. I wouldn't underestimate just how confused, unaware, or unengaged vast swathes of the American electorate really are.

If you accept the premise that the most obvious lies and prevarications from Sanders mouth have any kind of impact, then that's necessarily also accepting that some citizens simply get fooled.

[_Some Schmo]

The mainstream media is giving these jackals too light a treatment.

This is easily the most frustrating thing about the news these days.

The fact is, however, that a good number of people don't care for the truth. It's less effort to believe feel-good BS. Just look at Majax.

[_honorentheos]

The challenge with this is that morality is at the core for conservative arguments against same sex marriage and abortion rights. Making the moral stand of the person making the decision the grounds for justifying refusing service is playing the bias game. Your view of what is amoral and that of Jeff Sessions are miles apart. Saying you just have a better grasp of what morality actually is would be a step backwards in the fight for equal protection. I can't believe it would stand up against past rulings.

I don't see it as a challenge. I favor the right of people to refuse service in general. I'm a stereotypical libertarian like that. I simultaneously can recognize that people are wrong about things. I think it would be fine to refuse service to Joseph Goebbels. That some Republicans see Obama as just as bad doesn't change this. It just means they have terrible judgment. We are free to point this out.

It's legal to refuse service to people for their political views. I favor weakening public accommodations laws, but even if I didn't, this isn't anything in dispute. The debate over civility on this is about how to ethically treat people in civil society, not what is legal.

If Joseph Goebbels were alive and well, and patronizing your establishment I would assume a call to the authorities alerting them of the presence of a wanted war criminal would probably be better than just not serving him. Just saying.

And that's not to be flippant but rather precise in regards to what it is at stake. Protesting or calling out Sanders, resorting to any of a wide range of forms of expression would be more than fine. More power to the person who would do so. But public accommodation and equal protection have significance both in the past and present that make refusal of service for who someone is or what one thinks of them morally is fraught with peril for civil rights arguments going forward. If you can't make the argument from neutrality then there's reason to believe your argument is fatally flawed. Taken up as a new precedent might be seen as favorable among libertarians but there are far fewer steps between that position and chaos for my person political views. And if fully groked, I doubt most who favor seeing Sanders booted would be so close to your position. To be clear, most people aren't judging much more beyond it satisfies their emotional distaste for Trump and his agents.

[_canpakes]

I think we've lost something when teenagers no longer work in food service as a first job because companies prefer cheap and lifelong illegal immigrant labor. Too many young people just don't understand work or the value of a dollar.

Yes, it's so unfortunate how those illegals blackmailed the restaurant owners into hiring them at such low wages, and how those same terrible illegals are responsible for white kids not wanting to work there.

[_Gunnar]

I understand their visceral displeasure at having to serve someone who supports and does the bidding of someone as disgusting as Trump, but by refusing to do so they make it easier for Trump to falsely claim the higher moral ground.

[_Chap]

... I see a lot of young Americans who think food service is beneath them.

Really? You are (please correct me) an optometrist, I believe.

So when you meet young people, how do you locate the 'lot' of them who think food service is beneath them? Is it:

"Read the bottom row, please."

[...]

"By the way, have you ever thought of applying for a job at Wendy's?"

Really? You must get some interesting replies ...

Or is it more that someone once said somewhere on a website you read that "a lot of young Americans [...] think food service is beneath them", and you are just repeating that statement?

[_EAllusion]

If Joseph Goebbels were alive and well, and patronizing your establishment I would assume a call to the authorities alerting them of the presence of a wanted war criminal would probably be better than just not serving him. Just saying.

What makes Goebbels a person who would be wanted for his crimes against humanity and not Huckabee Sanders has a lot to do with who belongs to a nation maintaining military superiority. I'm not joking.

That's obviously not the point, though. I think you get that. I was picking an example of someone whose actions are heinous in such a way that people might be morally permitted, possibly obligated, not to serve them. In the case of this story, the people who refused to serve her are part of classes that Sanders is specifically demonizing.

But public accommodation and equal protection have significance both in the past and present that make refusal of service for who someone is or what one thinks of them morally is fraught with peril for civil rights arguments going forward.

It doesn't though. What was done is perfectly legal. That's not in dispute at all. And this legal boundary is maintained without significantly undermining public accommodation laws for protected classes. I remember Scott Walker being refused service at Marigold Kitchen a half a decade ago and the social order did not collapse. We can bracket how we feel about public accommodation laws because they are not under threat by actions like this. I'm not sure why you are choosing to focus on this when the focus is really on if the store owner was morally correct to boot her. The civility people are arguing that she should've been more tolerant because that's what it takes to have a functioning civil society. The critics of them are arguing that some people either 1) deserve to be shunned and/or 2) shouldn't be obligated to serve people who are doing horrible things like actively participating in the dehumanization of them.

[_Some Schmo]

I understand their visceral displeasure at having to serve someone who supports and does the bidding of someone as disgusting as Trump, but by refusing to do so they make it easier for Trump to falsely claim the higher moral ground.

Sadly, this country cares not for moral high ground. What they care for is BS.

[_Some Schmo]

You know, it's possible this whole incident was a misunderstanding. Maybe Sanders didn't realize she was in a vegetarian restaurant when they told her we don't serve cows.

[_honorentheos]

If Joseph Goebbels were alive and well, and patronizing your establishment I would assume a call to the authorities alerting them of the presence of a wanted war criminal would probably be better than just not serving him. Just saying.

What makes Goebbels a person who would be wanted for his crimes against humanity and not Huckabee Sanders has a lot to do with who belongs to a nation maintaining military superiority. I'm not joking.

Nor was I.

That's obviously not the point, though. I think you get that. I was picking an example of someone whose actions are heinous in such a way that people might be morally permitted, possibly obligated, not to serve them. In the case of this story, the people who refused to serve her are part of classes that Sanders is specifically demonizing.

It's useful to point out that in the case of a Goebbels one has the law behind one when one reports him, while choosing to express oneself through refusing service would be a vanity project with dubious other effects. It has the added problem of contradicting the groundwork associated with public accommodation and the right to equal protection. It's not off to insert the legal aspects of both the Sanders event and the hypothetical Goebbels resurrection to get some chicken. While one may argue that the employees of the owner who were gay and felt Sanders' role in defending Trump administration policies that attack the rights of LGBTQ persons represents a defensible right to refuse service, one isn't presented with any facts that support this beyond the workers reacted emotionally to Sanders' presence.

That was the threshold that many feel is worthy of potentially undermining the foundation of civil rights arguments. And frankly I think it fails because it can't achieve simple thresholds of argument such as demonstrating that Sanders was an actual threat to anyone or disrupting business operations. The foundation for the claim lies on a particular moral claim that violates any attempt at neutral applicability but rather seems directly targeted at people where one must rely on a particular biased judgment without the backing of the law to determine who gets to be served and who can be refused.

But public accommodation and equal protection have significance both in the past and present that make refusal of service for who someone is or what one thinks of them morally is fraught with peril for civil rights arguments going forward.

It doesn't though. What was done is perfectly legal. That's not in dispute at all. And this legal boundary is maintained without significantly undermining public accommodation laws for protected classes. We can bracket how we feel about those laws.

I'm not sure why you are choosing to focus on this when the focus is really on if the store owner was morally correct to boot her.

Because this can't be the threshold for violating legal precedent. Protesting or expressing oneself according to one's right to do so? Absolutely. But removed from the law, moral arguments rely on personal judgment with gatekeepers who determine who gets in and who doesn't on the grounds we all ought to share the same moral framework. She could be morally correct to you and have acted amorally in someone else's opinion and you would be left to say as you have, "They have bad judgment."

A pluralistic society can't operate that way.

The civility people are arguing that she should've been more tolerant because that's what it takes to have a functioning civil society. The critics of them are arguing that some people either 1) deserve to be shunned and/or 2) shouldn't be obligated to serve people who are doing horrible things like actively participating in the dehumanization of them.

Neither gets to the point that the right to equal protection combined with the right to public accommodation as established in civil rights case rulings is a separate issue from point 1 and violated by point 2. Those who want to be uncivil in expressing themselves are free to do so. Refusing service at a restaurant over a difference of beliefs gets into murky legal territory on its face while clearly creating issues going forward for broader civil rights arguments.

You're relying on the notion that people can judge appropriately where and when public accommodation can be trumped by a person making a value judgment so we must allow for that. But that puts us back to cases where people argue knowingly what kinds of religions, races, beliefs or individuals are meant in laws that were ruled to violate a persons protected rights. Your superior moral judgment can't be the gatekeeper, EA. You need to make your case from some neutral foundation.