We seem to be at risk in America of losing the moral high ground. In its place, we’ve discovered a bridge of hypocrisy.

Exhibit A is Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The press secretary for President Donald Trump decided to go out for dinner with some friends at a restaurant called the Red Hen in Virginia. She wasn’t in the restaurant very long before she was told by the owner she would have to leave because her employees were uncomfortable serving her.

“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” said Stephanie Wilkinson, one of the Red Hen’s owners, in a story for The Washington Post. “I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

Wilkinson noted that Sanders was very agreeable, and her party left the restaurant. She also noted that several of her employees are gay, and they were upset over Sanders defending Trump’s desire to bar transgender people from serving in the military.

Since the incident, the Internet has resembled an active volcano in Hawaii, with conservatives outraged at how Sanders was treated and Democrats acting like they’d just evicted some irritating, immature punk from the Big Brother house.

Leading the charge has been Maxine Waters, a California congresswoman who suggested that the Red Hen incident should only be the first volley in a messy war with the Trump Administration.

“For these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend (Trump), they’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop (at) a department store. The people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them,” Waters said in another story in The Washington Post.

Setting aside the delicious irony that a black woman is telling white folks y’all can’t come around here, flipping the script on America’s racist past, there’s a big problem with anyone promoting public harassment of a group of people. That kind of attitude might pass for civilization in medieval times, but this is the 21st century. We shouldn’t stoop to schoolyard bullying because we have ideological differences.

Democrats should not be embracing this attitude of fighting fire with fire, especially since many of them were up in arms over the Masterpiece Cakeshop debacle, when owner Jack Phillips refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple based on “religious objections.” Liberals were the ones up in arms about a business serving the public refusing to do so for certain members, but now they’re giving Wilkinson an atta boy for giving the president’s press secretary the boot and sitting back as Waters dances around the flames with a gasoline can.

There’s a risk with fighting fire with fire—you wind up with ashy human remains and burnt S’mores. It was bad enough when you had Republicans with a sense of entitlement looking down their noses at people, but now Democrats are mimicking their GOP foes, and that just leads to further distrust by the American people in their elected representatives.

I’ve seen the days of elected officials reaching across the aisle to reach a compromise on the people’s business slowly make its exit over my many years as a writer and journalist, but in the last few years, that slow crawl has turned into a frantic gallop, where we denigrate our adversaries with snarky tweets and break out the champagne when someone who is different from us is tossed from a public establishment.

Instead of duking it out on at the Capitol all day before punching a time clock and having a beer with those whose butts they were reaming, our elected representatives and their hired hands have made the political arena into a 24-7 New York alley, where someone could be shanked—figuratively and literally—for walking in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two things should have happened in lieu of Sanders being asked to take her business elsewhere.

Wilkinson could have opted to fire her servers, because while it technically wasn’t illegal to oust Sanders for her political ideology, it’s a very fine line between refusing service for politics and refusing service because of someone’s race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.

If Wilkinson didn’t want to give the servers a pink slip, she also could have had them focus on the other customers while she stepped up and dealt with the Sanders party herself.

Anyone who has worked in the food business—or any business—knows there are some customers you’d like to tell them to take a hike. When you start discriminating, though, you have to ask yourself if you’re really that far removed from Jack Phillips and whether you’re comfortable denying them a buttercream-frosted masterpiece.

Let gay people have their cake and eat it, too, and let Sarah Huckabee Sanders order a burger.