Accompanied by her state police executive protection detail, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) was having lunch with a couple friends at The Croissanterie, a French style pastry shop in an upscale neighborhood on the west side of Little Rock earlier this month.
They sat for a while, ate, paid and were allowed to leave a tip before the owner approached a member of the security detail.
"They were told they needed to leave because they were being a threat or making the staff uncomfortable, making the customers uncomfortable," Jerry Cox of the Family Council relays.
The Croissanterie denies "indicating that anyone felt threatened," but said it made the decision to "support our employees and guests who expressed they were uncomfortable."
Once the message about the 90-minute limit was received, Gov. Sanders and her party left without making a scene.
In a written statement, the restaurant says allowing Sanders to stay "risked being perceived as a lack of support for the community that makes up the majority of our team."
The letter did not specify which community that was, but Cox imagines what it would have been like if the shoe were on the other foot.
"Imagine if a gay activist had been told they had to leave Chick-fil-A," he poses.
In 2012, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, the current governor's father, organized a "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" to support the company's Christian principles and to counter the hate speech and intolerant bigotry from the Left.
During Donald Trump's first term as president, Sanders served as his White House press secretary from 2017-2019, and this lunch was not the first time she was asked to leave a restaurant.
In 2018, around the same time Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California) called on her supporters to publicly confront and harass members of the Trump administration, Sanders said she was kicked out of a restaurant in Lexington, Virginia.
Cox says it seemed like society was moving away from the craziness of the Biden years, when conservative, faith-based, and pro-life values were described as being "blacklisted" or marginalized in the public square, but he submits "there's a thin veneer with all of this DEI, woke philosophy on the part of the Left just brewing underneath."
He believes the nation is one election away from going back to being forced to coddle the delicate sensibilities of leftist snowflakes.
"There's a mindset out there that people shouldn't be bothered in any way," Cox observes. "If you get out of your house, you're going to be bothered by things. Welcome to society."
Gov. Sanders responded to the incident by saying the restaurant proved it does not meet the state's standard of hospitality, while asserting her administration "will continue to focus on lifting Arkansans up, not tearing others down with discrimination and hate."
