Trump’s Tweets, Gay Cakes, and Sarah’s Horrible No-Good Trip to the Red Hen

One of the things we as a society seem to struggle with the most is the concept of false equivalencies. This is the idea that being objective or balanced means giving two different positions equal weight, even if one is demonstrably unequal. It manifests in what I call “What about-ism,” which is a tactic that distracts and deflects consideration of a specific problem, in favor of wasting time, energy, and brain cells arguing about both similar and dissimilar other incidents and instances, thereby neither addressing nor solving anything at all.

Case in point: Sarah Huckabee Sanders recent horrible, no-good trip to the restaurant Red Hen in Lexington, VA, where, after asking her employees what they wanted her to do about Sanders showing up with a group for dinner, the owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, asked Sarah to leave because of her role in the Trump administration. The entire party left with Sarah, and the restaurant did not charge them for what they had consumed so far.

After Sanders chose to tweet about this from her government Twitter handle, rather than her personal one, the story caught fire.

It’s no surprise that those on the Trumpster end of the ideological spectrum are losing their collective minds over this incident. A little more surprising is how many people who are anti-administration or generally anywhere in the non-Trump-supporting majority of the country are also criticizing this move.

The arguments range from “this is a slippery slope right back to Jim Crow segregation laws,” to “this is no different than the baker not wanting to make a cake for a gay wedding,” to vague assertions that we must follow Michelle Obama’s convention exhortation that “when they go low, we go high,” and therefore we are “stooping to their level” to do something like this.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

There is a difference between discriminating against a class of people — and in the case of the LGBTQ community, a protected class of people — and refusing service to someone whose individual behavior doesn’t live up to an acceptable code of conduct.

If a restaurant refused to serve Harvey Weinstein, it wouldn’t be because he was Jewish. If they refused to service Bill Cosby, it wouldn’t be because he was black. And I don’t think people from either end of the ideological spectrum would be complaining about it either.

Sanders was neither asked to leave because she is a woman, nor because she is theoretically a Christian. She was asked to leave because the restaurant owner and her employees share the opinion of many in this country: That Sanders’s behavior and choice is to lie outright to the American people every day, and in doing so, to be an apologist for and therefore complicit in actions that are, even as we speak, being challenged as unlawful, unconstitutional, and immoral. She’s a public figure making public statements, and these are the consequences she’s facing for that.

Just like the first amendment doesn’t protect one from consequences for one’s speech, and one is not entitled to, for example, a TV show, there are consequences for being a party to the incredibly divisive actions of this administration.

To make her complicity and misuse of the public pulpit equivalent to two citizens planning to conduct a lawful ceremony is a false equivalency. Don’t fall for it.

It is, rather, very similar to the case of the President himself and one of his biggest corporate enablers: Twitter.

Twitter has terms of service that are quite explicit.

“We reserve the right to remove Content that violates the User Agreement, including for example, copyright or trademark violations, impersonation, unlawful conduct, or harassment.”

The User Agreement goes on to list a variety of uses that might qualify as “hateful speech” including speech meant to threaten or impugn an entire class or group of people.

There are numerous instances where the President has violated these terms with tweets that impugn groups of people, incite followers to harass those in disagreement with him, and sometimes just incite violence directly. He also notably re-tweets hateful speech from other accounts that have been subsequently penalized.

And yet Twitter leadership, led by the CEO Jack Dorsey, have stated that the very fact that Trump is President makes his tweets newsworthy, and therefore exempt from their own code of conduct. As a community builder, I can tell Jack: When your rules apply differently to different community members, it’s impossible for anyone to have trust in you. The only thing we Twitter users know for sure is that you will prioritize the President over the people, every time.

This is not just a case of Trumpsters wanting to have it two hypocritical ways — say nay to the gay cake, but yes to dinners out and reckless tweets — this is even more a case of Trumpsters wanting to equate discrimination against groups of people because of who they are with consequences for individuals because of what they do.

It is not “going low” to reject that argument.

It’s having discernment. It’s applying intellectual, not just ideological, consistency. It is, in fact, taking the moral high ground.