March 24, 2007 12:30 am
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The Associated Press
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Four women repeated their claim Friday that they were told to leave an IHOP restaurant because two of them kissed.
“It was a casual kiss,” certified nursing assistant Eva Sandoval said. “It was the sort of kiss I would give my grandfather.”
The company maintained, however, that the kissing was more extensive and that the manager only asked the women to tone things down.
Sandoval, 23, of Kansas City, said that during a visit to the IHOP Corp. restaurant in suburban Grandview earlier this month, she got up to make a phone call and briefly kissed her girlfriend, Blair Funk, 25.
After the phone conversation, Sandoval said, she talked briefly in the restaurant’s lobby with Funk, then started another conversation with a third member of the group, Jacquie Smith.
The manager approached them, Sandoval said, and said there had been complaints about public displays of affection at the women’s table.
“He said, ’Don’t look at me stupid like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You know you were back there French-kissing at the table,”’ Sandoval said, reading from a prepared statement at a news conference. “We didn’t know what he was talking about because we hadn’t been.”
The women said they were told to leave and not come back.
The gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights group PROMO planned a protest later Friday near the restaurant. The women said they wanted a public apology and for the manager to be fired, although they later said sensitivity training would be an acceptable alternative.
“It would be a start,” Funk said.
IHOP said the manager had undergone sensitivity training before the incident and said its restaurants do not treat people differently based on sexual orientation.
“We’re welcoming to all. That’s how we built our business for 50 years,” spokesman Patrick Lenow said. “What’s not welcome at our restaurants are bold displays of affection, with open-mouth kissing and caressing. That’s really not welcome at any restaurants.”
Lenow said the women, who had been going to the restaurant for seven years, had been asked before not to do such things as “exposing bare skin and lying down in booths with their heads resting on other guests’ laps.”
“What we’re troubled by is that a guest-service issue has turned into seemingly so much more,” said Lenow, who attended the news conference but did not speak inside.
The three women who spoke at Friday’s news conference said the prior incidents Lenow mentioned never happened. However, they said, they had kissed numerous times before and had not been confronted about it.
“We’d never been approached before,” said Smith, 21.
The fourth woman, Smith’s partner, was not identified and did not appear at the news conference. Smith said she did not want her name used.
There is no state or federal prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation by restaurants and other establishments.
The women’s allegations were first made public in a column that ran March 16 in The Kansas City Star.
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