air travel

A customer on a recent Southwest Airlines flight had an uncomfortable experience after staff asked her to conceal a sign expressing support for President Joe Biden.

Jenny Grondahl, a labor organizer and outreach specialist for Arizona Latino voters for Biden during the 2020 campaign, was flying from Phoenix to San Diego last week.

With her, she carried a sign that read "Arizonenses Con Biden"—a souvenir of her work for the campaign.

It wasn't long before a Southwest employee asked her to conceal the sign, saying that "many people [were] offended by it." Grondahl asked the employee what would've been done if it was a tee shirt supporting Biden, to which the employee replied Grondahl would've been asked to turn it inside out.

Ultimately, she folded the sign and placed it under her seat.

Grondahl told Soo Youn of the Washington Post about the incident:

"I'm looking around at the gate, and I'm thinking, how many of you was it - 20 out of 110 people? And how offended were you? What did you say? How could people have such a visceral reaction to seeing the name of our president on a sign?"

She continued:

"I just looked around, and I thought about humanity in general. How devastatingly horrible that someone saw a name, or a different language, on a sign that I'm carrying, and stood in line to complain to the airline staff to the point that they then had to come complain to me, and asked me not to bring this on board?"

The story sparked a host of reactions on social media.

In situations like this, liberals said these policies were rarely enforced for conservative paraphernalia, while conservatives said the double standard favored liberals.

Grondahl's souvenir sign is now hanging in her office—the folds in it another less welcome souvenir of her uncomfortable flight.