Anti-LGBTQ+ Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders (R) was asked to leave The Croissanterie, a restaurant in Little Rock, last week after she, two guests, and her security detail showed up unannounced, leading some employees and guests to express discomfort at her presence.

The restaurant’s owners said Sanders’ well-known political stances against “the community that makes up the majority” of their employees, their families, and friends compelled owners to ask her to leave once she finished her meal.

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The owners noted that the restaurant has a policy of only allowing diners to remain for an hour and a half (a time limit which Sanders kept to) and that they offered Sanders and her fellow diners drinks to-go as a courtesy. The owners also said that Sanders and her party left without incident and without most diners even noticing.

 In a press release about the incident, Sanders said, “Arkansans are known for their warm hospitality, and while that restaurant certainly doesn’t meet that standard, my administration will continue to focus on lifting Arkansans up, not tearing others down with discrimination and hate.”

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However, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, the wife of Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy, called the restaurant’s owners LGBTQ+ culinary tyrants who dehumanized Sanders.

“This is not southern hospitality, this is Soviet hospitality,” Campos-Duffy said in a recent broadcast, according to Joe My God. “It’s very revealing of who they are. And the owners of this restaurant, who are LGBTQ, and angry about these kinds of things, they are culinary tyrants. It’s not that they are snowflakes and they can’t handle it — no, no, no — they’re tyrants.”

“So if you don’t agree with their political ideas or ideology, they are going to dehumanize you, they’re going to kick you out of their restaurant, they’re going to humiliate you, and that’s just the most tolerable of the punishments they have for you. By the way, every conservative, prominent conservative, who goes into a liberal restaurant wonders if their food is going to be spit on, everyone knows that,” she continued.

“But that’s not the only thing, if you don’t agree with them, [Black Lives Matter], they will burn your business down. If you don’t agree that you want to take a vaccine during COVID, they’ll take away your job or tell you your kid can’t go to school. And it goes all the way up to Charlie Kirk, who was basically killed for his political ideas,” she continued, equating being asked to leave to being shot to death in front of a crowded university plaza.

“Do we want to live in a country run by people like this, who have no tolerance for other people’s opinions, who don’t even think someone should come in and have a meal without being harassed because they don’t agree with them, or do you want to live like we lived basically back in the ’80s, where we agreed to live peacefully with each other and we didn’t have to agree on everything?” she added.

Campos-Duffy may not realize that many people see the 1980s as a time of great social tumult characterized by the so-called War on Drugs that resulted in disproportionate police brutality towards and incarceration of minorities, not to mention the fact that President Ronald Reagan basically ignored the HIV/AIDS epidemic while thousands of marginalized and queer people died from it.

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