I really appreciate your editorial (“Sign of our times,” Oct. 8), but would like to add a slightly different perspective. In the sequence of events, the critical step in this story was that the friend contacted the Herald. You included this in the editorial but missed the significance of this action. The Herald was contacted to apply pressure on the restaurant to bend to the will of a patron. That is the actual cause of the uproar over such a small thing.
The restaurant owners could not afford bad press, so the only choice they had was to remove the sign whether they wanted to or not. Their right to display whatever they chose had been taken from them. The situation and the strong reaction to it is not about a sign, it’s about personal rights.
So the title to your piece was accurate, it is a sign of our times, since it seems we have moved in a direction where individual rights can be trampled on because someone is offended. In this particular situation, the restaurant had the right to display whatever art they chose and the patron had the right to choose where to eat. That is where it should have ended. Instead, social pressure was applied to force an outcome. Very sad.
Barb Bell
Durango
