Putting bigots in charge

OPINION:

Maybe it’s time to give liberals their head on civil rights, immigration and the like. Get rid of the statutes and the supremacy of federal law — let public sentiment enforce correct behavior and set policy.

Recently, the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, denied service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders for the immorality of working for President Trump. Whether this was a valid expression of free speech or discrimination for her conservative views will be adjudicated not by the courts but by public opinion.

After a two-week closure, the prudence of this decision will be determined by whether that Red Hen continues as a going concern or shutters for lack of customers in that Virginia community.

Starbucks, after a Philadelphia store denied use of a restroom to two black men who made no purchases, quickly assuaged leftist media screams by imposing anti-bias training on all its employees.

Now Starbucks consultants, who include the president and director-counsel of the NAACP and a distinguished fellow at the think tank Demos, recommend more intensive training, intervention in the company’s hiring, promotion and training policies — including the firing of many corporate executives, managers and employees who are not adequately rehabilitated to appropriately embrace white guilt and otherwise think correctly.

What Starbucks chooses to do will ultimately depend on how it reads that its actions will affect traffic at its stores. More broadly, CEOs see taking an active stand on social issues and immigration as an essential element of branding.

Fine, we don’t need the civil rights statutes anymore — whether a majority or significant minority will offer or withhold patronage will decide what is right and wrong.

Everyone could serve who they choose but certain safeguards would be needed — for example, assurances for transparency.

If an establishment is for whites only or any other group, then it should be required to put a sign in the window, and public sentiment and corporate leaders who approve expense account policies can decide.

If enough folks don’t want to eat with others who don’t look like themselves or if enough disapprove, the restaurants will flourish — or shutter — and all the money we waste on lawyers adjudicating issues like these would be saved.

Dusting off an old Jim Crow sign or reading this in disgust? Be clear, a culture that settles these kinds of issues by “public opinion” is headed precisely in that direction — and to tyranny and greater license for free speech.

Look at how efforts to eradicate racism — not merely from action but thought, too — have so effectively instigated micro spaces, politically correct speech and virulent persecution of guilty — by-DNA white males on university campuses.

But the process of waiting for incidences can be an appallingly slow method to purify our society. Those who believe our elections are unjust and put folks who are bigots in charge should harass their aids in public and demonstrate outside their homes, like White House adviser Stephen Miller, as Congresswoman Maxine Waters encourages.

Trust me, it is effective. A few days prior to the presidential election a hysterical patron at an upscale Georgetown restaurant screamed at me insistently that my mere presence in the establishment had spoiled his anniversary celebration with his wife.

The management did nothing to restrain him — I am working on becoming more enlightened.

A Chicago federal court recently upheld the right of sanctuary cities to be protected from federal discipline. In a nutshell, officials in blue state governments, like California, may yield to popular opinion and not be compelled to help enforce federal immigration statutes.

Now, I guess Californians should also be able to withhold that portion of their taxes that support the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service.

Fine, officials in red state governments should now not be required to help reunite children and parents who entered the country illegally. And applying this principle evenhandedly, state legislators in Texas should no longer be compelled to comply with the Voting Rights Act in setting boundaries of congressional districts or enforcing voter rights in federal elections.

If Texas voters think they are behaving badly, they will throw the rascals out.

We didn’t need those imperfect federal laws on discrimination, voter rights or secure borders — and they are divisive anyway.

Let the mob decide and see where that takes our civilization.

• Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.