White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family were confronted by the owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, about a month ago and asked to leave. At least one Democratic congresswoman, Maxine Waters, called for more of the same: “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 push on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

At least some were only too happy to act upon Waters’s advice. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and presidential advisor Stephen Miller were both harassed and forced to leave restaurants, and a Republican congresswoman from Florida was surrounded and forced to flee a movie theater.

Conservative commentators — and not a few Democrats — were appalled. Speaking for the latter, former Obama advisor David Axelrod posted, “Kind of amazed and appalled by the number of folks on the Left who applauded the expulsion of the Press Secretary and her family from a restaurant.”

Many on the left, however, argued that conservatives had no standing to complain about Sanders being refused service, as they were generally supportive of the Supreme Court’s decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop, involving a baker’s right not to bake special cakes celebrating unions that violate his religious beliefs.

That charge of hypocrisy is fatally flawed. Masterpiece dealt with Colorado’s authority to punish a baker for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same gender couple in contravention of his religious beliefs. Not one conservative of whom I am aware argued that the owner of the Red Hen should be legally compelled to serve Sanders. Indeed, conservatives, particularly those of a libertarian temper, are far more inclined than liberals to defend the right to associate with whomever one wants.

Rather, conservatives argued that the restaurant owner was wrong to exercise her legal right to refuse service to Sanders. America, they contended, is fast becoming a toxic society, because there is no public space where people interact as fellow citizens, without having identity and political labels attached to them whether it be sporting events or going out to dinner.

That conflation of legal rights with what is right leads to the degradation of political and civil life. Under court president Aharon Barak (and to a lesser degree his successors), the Israeli Supreme Court created out of whole cloth numerous political norms, as a matter of constitutional law, that had no basis in any statutory language — for example, whether a minister under criminal investigation could continue to serve.

The treatment of political behavior as a legal issue has served to retard the development of any norms of things that are simply not done. As a consequence, there is no political price to be paid for shabby conduct so long as the Supreme Court does not specifically declare it to be illegal.

STILL, LIBERALS MIGHT ASK: Why is it wrong for the owner of the Red Hen to refuse to serve Sanders and her family, and not wrong for the baker to refuse to serve the couple in question? First, the Red Hen owner refused to sell anything to Sanders. She evicted her from the restaurant as unworthy of being there. Jack Phillips, the baker, was perfectly happy to sell the couple in question anything they wanted on the shelves in his bakery, just not to design a wedding cake. (In a similar case involving a Washington state florist who refused to provide flower arrangements for a same-gender ceremony, the would-be purchasers were longtime customers.)

The only thing the baker and the florist refused to sell were items to be used celebrating a “marriage” that in their religious view is not and cannot be a marriage. They could not endorse a message that there was something to celebrate in actions that contravene a Divine command.

By way of contrast, no one could possibly have viewed the sale of dinner to Sarah Sanders as anything other than a normal commercial exchange of goods for money, at a profit. The owner, after all, was not being asked to cater the Trump inaugural.

Were an entertainer to decline to perform at the White House or at a political rally, I cannot imagine any conservative commentator would criticize that entertainer’s refusal to be a participant in what amounts to an implicit endorsement of a particular politician. That would be considered an act of conscience. The refusal to transgress what one views as a Divine command is no less worthy of respect.

 Trumps Kicks an Own Goal

There is nothing more demoralizing to a soccer team than when a player inadvertently kicks the ball into his own side’s net. President Trump managed precisely such an “own goal” in his post-summit press conference in Helsinki with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

There was no urgency about a summit with the Russian leader. Such summits inevitably confer legitimacy on despots like Putin, whose troops have invaded and annexed neighboring territories, and who has ordered the assassination of political enemies in the United Kingdom, resulting in the deaths of innocent bystanders as well.

One issue of particular concern for Israel — that of maintaining the buffer zone on the Golan Heights — was front and center. But those discussions did not require a summit. Only Trump’s conviction that he is the master of the “art of the deal” led him to seek one out.

In the post-summit press conference, the president juxtaposed Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” insistence that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 election to the conclusion of the US intelligence agencies that it most certainly had. He added that he could see no reason why Russia would have attempted to intervene. Characteristically, he reversed himself the next day and affirmed his full faith in US intelligence.

He not only threw American intelligence under the bus, while on foreign territory, but he managed to destroy, in an instant, the political momentum that had been building in his favor, especially since his nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, as his opponents seem bent on alienating the largest possible swath of the American public, with ever more crazy antics.

And just as many of his policies were beginning to pay off handsomely, he provided a stark reminder of the character flaws that made many so wary of him from the start. Only childish vanity led him to question systematic Russian interference in the 2016 election, as if doing so would tarnish his victory and delegitimize his presidency.

Equally distressing was his apparent inability to calculate the likely effect of his words — hardly a first. His refusal to call Putin out for the election interference or for anything else fed the Democrats’ collusion narrative and provided grist for the mill of Democratic claims that Putin has something on him.

In point of fact, the Trump administration’s Russian policy has been far tougher than that of his predecessors. Veteran Moscow correspondent Paul Starobin sums up in City Journal: “Economic sanctions on Russia, insisted on by Congress and enforced by the administration, remain in effect; NATO members, after the recent contentious meeting attended by Trump, agreed to bolster their defenses, including against ‘Russia’s aggressive actions’ to undermine Euro-Atlantic security; the Trump administration (unlike the Obama administration) has decided to send lethal military aid to Ukrainian forces battling Russian-backed rebels in that country; and Trump probably made Putin grimace by publicly referring, on his recent trip to Europe, to Kremlin efforts to foster German dependence on Russian gas.”

President Obama mocked Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential debates for describing Russia as a major strategic threat to the US. He made numerous remarks no less obsequious than Trump’s (“I’m aware of... the extraordinary work that you [i.e., Putin] have done on behalf of the [Russian] people”), and assured Putin’s second-in-command, Dmitri Medvedev, on open mike that he would be more accommodating to Russia as soon as the 2012 election was behind him.

But all that was forgotten, as even Republicans publicly assailed the president. Trump proved, as always, that he is his own worst enemy, and he inadvertently provided a plausible (though, I think, wrong) answer to the dangling question of why the Russians might have intervened in 2016 on his behalf.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 720. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com