EDITORIAL: Searching for civility

Screaming at people who disagree with you is an unbecoming habit for a two-year-old. It should be an unacceptable one for adults to engage in when their political opponents are eating dinner at a restaurant.

Yet over the last week that’s exactly what has happened to members of the Trump administration.

A fellow customer at a Mexican restaurant berated White House adviser Steven Miller as a “fascist.” Two days later, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen left a Mexican restaurant after a mob started screaming at her. They congregated around her table and yelled things like, “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace.” After several minutes of verbal abuse, Nielsen left the restaurant, and the rabble-rousers claimed victory.

In a statement, Megan McLaughlin, a member of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America Steering Committee, said Nielsen “should never be allowed to eat and drink in public again.”

That attitude is concerning enough coming from a fringe group. But over the weekend, mob intimidation received a congressional endorsement.

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., told a screaming crowd.

This type of behavior is illegal. You don’t have the right to harass your political opponent when they are in someone else’s private establishment. People who do should be arrested and charged.

That’s different from what happened to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders over the weekend. Sanders and her family went to a restaurant in Virginia to eat, but the restaurant’s owner refused to serve her and asked her to leave.

Ironically, the left wanted to deny this same right to Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who was at the center of the recent Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court decision. That baker, however, was happy to sell the gay couple anything in his store. He was only unwilling to bake them a custom cake for an event that violated his religious beliefs.

Sanders left the restaurant and then tweeted about what happened. This is how it should work. Two individuals exercised their rights without threatening each other with violence.

Even a country that is divided by politics can have some civility if there is respect for the political freedoms of one’s opponent.