It was serendipitous timing that the Supreme Court issued its order, instructing Washington’s state Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling against Arlene’s Flowers, as debate raged over a Virginia restaurant that refused to serve dinner to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.
Some conservatives compared the Red Hen’s refusal of service with freedom-of-conscience cases that have popped up recently as state and local agencies punish Christian bakers, florists, and photographers. “Bake the Cake!” conservatives joked on social media.
[Previous coverage: Supreme Court could follow ‘bake the cake’ with decision to hear ‘arrange the flowers’ case this week]
Ana Navarro, a conservative-turned-full-time-Trump-hater, argued that anyone who would “defend baker’s right to refuse service to gay couples” ought not to “whine” about people “refusing service to a person who’s the face of a deceitful administration. What’s good for the goose, is good for the Red Hen.”
But the analogy is inapt to the point of casuistry. Social liberals’ inability or refusal to see the difference is telling. Refusing to serve someone as an equal because of who he or she is is wholly different in kind from refusing to provide specialized services tailored to an event that in good conscience you find objectionable.
When Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson decided to persecute Baronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene’s Flowers, he said, “If Ms. Stutzman sells flowers to heterosexual couples, she must sell them to same-sex couples.”
Stutzman did sell flowers to same-sex couples. The plaintiffs were regular customers. What she wouldn’t do was participate in a wedding ceremony celebrating something she saw as a nonmarriage claiming to be a marriage.
The Supreme Court ordered Washington’s Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling against Stutzman in the light of the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling. Similarly, Masterpiece Cakeshop didn’t turn away gay customers. It neither made nor practiced any no-cake-for-gays policy. Instead, it refused to make specialty products celebrating a same-sex union. It was somewhere between the florist case, refusing to participate in a ceremony to which one objects, and a writer-for-hire refusing to pen an opinion article he finds wrong and harmful.
The tale of the Red Hen is, in contrast, one of outright discrimination. It could have been analagous to the cases that went to the Supreme Court only if, for example, the White House wanted to book a special dinner to celebrate “Sarah Sanders’ brave role in serving the American people.” If a restaurant owner objected, and thus refused to be implicated in such an event, that would be a matter of conscience.
Sanders, however, was there simply to have dinner. She was asking to be treated the same way as every other customer. Serving her dinner would not have expressed agreement or acceptance of her work. It would simply have been selling her the restaurant’s goods and services, the way it does to everyone else. Nobody was being asked to endorse or participate in anything Sanders was doing.
[Also read: Trump slams ‘filthy’ Red Hen restaurant after it kicked out Sarah Sanders]
The restaurant flatly declared her unworthy of its service because of who she is. Tactically it might seem best to call the Left’s embrace of the Red Hen simple hypocrisy, and there is a heaping dinner plate full of that, for sure.
But there’s a more important insight here. The distinction made by most people between refusing to serve the person and refusing to participate in his activity is not one made broadly on the Left. The notion of a human as a human, separated from his or her politics, is not one that today’s revved-up Left tolerates. You are your politics.
The personal is political, as they say, so the Left cannot accept the argument of the florist and the baker. They cannot accept the distinction between Sanders, a woman who wanted a meal, and Sanders, the spokeswoman whose boss they detest.
If the distinction between a person’s humanity and her politics is destroyed further, we will find it hard to maintain civic peace. That priceless commodity is already battered and derided. It is in the nation’s profound interest to preserve it and to repudiate the intolerance of those who seek to destroy it.
