U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders attend a wreath laying ceremony. (Photo by Arlington National Cemetery)

By now, the story is well known: White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, where she was dining over the weekend after the staff and owner recognized who she was.

The incident raises an interesting—and thorny—legal question: Can restaurants refuse to serve people or ask them to leave because of their political position or political opinions?

It’s certainly something bar and restaurant owners in D.C. may be thinking about, largely because they operate in a city where politics and serving people of different political persuasions just comes with the territory.

And there might be an answer. Unlike most places in the country, D.C. actually has a law that addresses this very issue. The 1977 Human Rights Act broadly prohibits government agencies and even private businesses from discriminating against anyone based on a number of “protected traits,” including race, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, place of residence, and yes, political affiliation.

So a D.C. restaurant owner would not be able to turn away Sanders or other Trump officials since that would mean singling them out based on their political affiliation. Case closed, right?

Well, it depends—and it’s complicated.

“Political affiliation is defined as the state of belonging to or endorsing a political party,” explains Stephanie Franklin, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Office of Human Rights, which enforces the Human Rights Act and litigates complaints.

In a sense, had Sanders been denied service at a D.C. restaurant, proving discrimination would involve proving it happened because she’s a Republican — or because of her affiliation to Trump and his own status as a Republican.

“If a place of public accommodation denies the full and equal enjoyment of goods, services, facilities, privileges, or advantages to an individual based on their actual or perceived affiliation with a politician who is a member of or affiliated with a political party, the establishment may have violated the DCHRA,” says Franklin.

That leaves a small opening for denying Trump officials service based on more discrete actions they have taken, and not simply because they are a member of the Republican Party or affiliated with a Republican elected official.

In the case of The Red Hen, the owner told The Washington Post that her decision was motivated by what her staff told her:

Several Red Hen employees are gay, she said. They knew Sanders had defended Trump’s desire to bar transgender people from the military. This month, they had all watched her evade questions and defend a Trump policy that caused migrant children to be separated from their parents.

“Tell me what you want me to do. I can ask her to leave,” Wilkinson told her staff, she said. “They said ‘yes.’”

But would that rise to the level of prohibited discrimination had it happened in a D.C. restaurant? It’s unclear.

Franklin stresses that the office does not comment on hypothetical cases or even cases that may have occurred elsewhere; it only deals with the facts of discrimination cases that are directly presented to it. And when it comes to political affiliation cases, the case law is slim to non-existent — over the last six years alone, there have been zero discrimination complaints based on political affiliation in public accommodations, which include bars, restaurants, hotels, banks and shops.

There is one more thing to consider: while D.C. prohibits discrimination based on the aforementioned protected traits, the owner of a restaurant could restrict behavior they reasonably believe would be regarded as hostile to other patrons based on their own identification in a protected group (race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc.) And that’s why banning white supremacists from holding events at local bars, restaurants or hotels is thought to be a relatively safe move in D.C., legally speaking.

This story originally appeared on WAMU