[D]on’t blame Randy George or the crew at his Middlesex bakery and cafe for feeling a bit hen-pecked this week.
The Red Hen Baking Co. — famous locally for its crusty bread and other tasty fare — has been getting trolled online and in other ways since a restaurant of a similar name in Lexington, Virginia, last week refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“You disgrace the whole state with what you did,” said one message.
“Goodbye. I’ll never come there again and I’ll never eat there again, and I’m going to tell everyone I see never to eat there. Goodbye,” said another.
One caller to the Red Hen Bakery left a voicemail saying “they’ll not patronize any of our restaurants ever again,” George said. “We have one location,” he noted.
Vice News reported this week that there are at least a dozen eateries around the country that use the name Red Hen. They don’t have common ownership, George said, but that hasn’t kept the trolls away.
George, co-owner of the Vermont version of the Red Hen, said he would not have turned Sanders away, but likely would have confronted her about some Trump administration policies with which he strongly disagrees.
“This should be about dialogue,” George said in a radio interview on WDEV Thursday.
“I don’t know if I would have accomplished anything by just throwing a member of the Trump administration out. … If a member of the Trump administration came to our establishment, I would consider it a golden opportunity to give them a piece of my mind,” he added.
For example, George said he attended a rally in Montpelier on Monday organized by the immigrants’ rights group Migrant Justice to protest the administration’s crackdown on people entering the country through its southern border.
“This kind of stuff needs to be talked about,” George said. “We need to speak out about it. And I think if I actually had the rare opportunity of being face to face with somebody from that administration, I would want to let them know my feelings about it.”
Asked whether the best course might be to let someone like Sanders eat her meal in peace, George said someone with such a high public profile should expect to be confronted in public.
“Somebody, as I said before, who is that much in the public eye, I think has to accept that when they’re in public, the public is going to talk to them. And with what’s going on right now, the public should be talking to them,” he said.
George said that public profile created a big difference between a restaurant refusing to serve someone like Sanders and other instances of businesses citing their beliefs in turning customers away, for example a bakery or a florist owned by religious conservatives refusing to provide its services to the wedding of a same-sex couple.
George argued that a business owner is more within her or his rights to react if the customer is in a public role. “If the person is outspoken, is a public personality, who’s in a position to affect all of our lives, I think that’s very different,” he said.
