MAGA couple caught throwing rat in gay-owned restaurant’s property as part of a long war

The video footage is clear.

Mike Washer, a conservative 54-year-old financial analyst, who bought and moved into a building in a commercial district in 2019 with his wife in the tiny town of The Plains, Virginia, threw a dead rat behind his gay neighbors’ restaurant and then took pictures of the carcass to share with the health department.

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He’s called the owners “fa***ts,” according to restaurant employees.

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He’s called the local towing company to remove restaurant patrons’ cars from shared parking spaces and screamed at diners for wearing masks.

He’s harassed the tiny town’s health and zoning departments and submitted FOIA requests to the all-volunteer town government, reaching back ten years looking for infractions the gay-owned restaurant may have committed.

They’re just some examples of the extraordinary— some might say compulsive — lengths Washer and his wife Melissa, 53, have gone to in a campaign to punish and expel their gay neighbors from the town, as told to the Washington Post.

William Waybourn and Craig Spaulding, married and both 76, own the Front Porch, a popular 60-seat bistro they opened several years ago after Waybourn retired from a long career in the national LGBTQ+ rights movement. The Dallas Voice has described him as a “living legend.”

Waybourn launched the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund in 1991, was president of the Dallas Gay Alliance, and served as managing director of GLAAD. He owned gay newspapers in Houston, Atlanta, New York, and Washington.

Now he and Spaulding were focused on smaller but just as meaningful gestures like proudly flying a rainbow flag at their restaurant. They’d never suffered homophobia or other anti-LGBTQ+ bias in The Plains.

Until the Washers moved in next door.

The couple are on the opposite end of the political spectrum as their gay neighbors. They self-identify as deeply conservative, are proudly MAGA, and are against a woman’s right to choose. A sign on their lawn, since removed, read “All Lives Matter.” A sign on their back railing reads, “Only JESUS can save America.”  

The family, including their son Regan, who recently won the Republican primary to serve on the county board of supervisors, were at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, extolling the riot on social media.

“It WAS an AMAZING day in DC!!” Melissa wrote in a post, also since taken down.

About the events at the Capitol that day, Melissa claimed, “We didn’t actually even know anything that was going on until we got home that night.”  

About the rat video, Melissa maintains the couple are the victims of dirty tricks, not their gay neighbors.

“We still feel like somebody put it there to, excuse me, eff with us,” she said. “Because they had done so many other little sh**ty things to us.”

By the fall of 2021, Waybourn and Spaulding had enough of the Washers and put a “no trespassing” order on the couple, who – ironically – had been regulars at the Front Porch.

The Washers double-downed with their own “no trespassing” order, put up signs banning restaurant parking in their shared lot, blocked food and vendor deliveries with their enormous black Denali SUV, and forced a vote at the town council to pull the Front Porch’s operating permit earlier this year.

The vote at the standing-room-only meeting went 3-2 for Waybourn and Spaulding.

While locals hoped it would bring an end to the town turmoil, Mike Washer says of the Front Porch owners: “I don’t give two s((ts about them.” The Washers are appealing to a county circuit court.

But they may have won already.

In June, William Waybourn suffered a mini-stroke when he went off blood thinners for back surgery. The couple has put the Front Porch up for sale.