Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
Enjoying these brief commentaries on current events!
I associate this incident with the recent “wedding” cake fiasco, in that the easiest solution for both aggrieved parties would simply be to move on to the next place that would happily take your business. I’m reminded of the old line, “some seek to offend, others seek to be offended.”
The Red Hen is in Lexington, VA, a town of 7,000, home to VMI and Washington & Lee University (where my son is a student), and over three hours from Washington, D.C. What has not been remarked upon, at least that I have heard, is that, owing to the comparatively conservative populations of those two institutions and the rural location of Lexington (at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley), it is a rather unlikely place for this whole absurd event to occur: no one is going to confuse it with Berkeley or Cambridge. I have not eaten at the Red Hen, but it and the Southern Inn are generally considered the best two restaurants in Lexington. Stick to the latter if you are traveling there.