A Vancouver restaurant manager was has been fired for refusing to serve a customer wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat, and he says he would do it all over again.
"I stand by my decision to ask the patron to remove his hat," Darin Park, the former manager at Vancouver's Stanley Park Teahouse restaurant, said in an statement emailed to Global News in Canada.
"The MAGA hat has come to symbolize racism, bigotry, islamaphobia [sic], misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia. As a person with a strong moral backbone, I had to take a stand against this guest's choice of headwear while in my former place of work. Absolutely no regrets," he continued.
The red ball caps became an iconic part of President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, but among opponents, the hats symbolize racism and bigotry, notes Global News.
Hodge wasn't fired because of politics, however, said Eva Gates, vice president of human resources for the Sequoia Group of Restaurants, which owns the Teahouse, but rather because he refused to serve a customer.
"A gentleman came in wearing a hat that was a Make America Great Again hat, and our manager went up to the gentleman and asked him to take off his hat, that he wouldn't serve him with that hat on," she said. "The gentleman said that he had a right to wear that hat. And [the manager] refused to serve him if he wouldn't take off his hat, and so the customer had to leave."
The company called Hodge a "good person with a big heart and a right to his personal beliefs," but said the reason he was fired was because he'd violated the company's "philosophy of tolerance."
"Sequoia does not support intolerance of any kind, and it is because of these principles that we cannot discriminate against someone based on their support for the current administration in the United States or any other bona fide political party," the company said in its statement.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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