Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Let's Eat Mor Chikin
My first time eating at a Chick-fil-A was back in the mid-90s when the chain opened a restaurant on the Harvard campus. (I'm guessing that wouldn't happen today.) I'm not willing to drive far enough to eat at one on August 1 in support of Mike Huckabee's "Chick-fil-A Day," but I do support the sentiment. It's OK for business owners and executives to have different views on a whole range of issues, including marriage, and for those views to be reflected in a company's marketplace identity. Let's not exaggerate the marketplace identity that Chick-fil-A is trying to cultivate, though.
Even Dana Milbank, while trying to take an "above the fray" tone in this op-ed for the Washington Post, gets it wrong. Milbank quotes from the controversial interview that the restaurant's president, Dan Cathy, gave to the Baptist Recorder. Cathy said:
“We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives.”
According to Milbank, "this implied that gay people (not to mention divorced people) had no business eating at Chick-fil-A."
Wait a second. How does expressing support for the traditional family imply that members of non-traditional families have no business doing business with Chick-fil-A? The very next sentence from Cathy, omitted by Milbank, was "We give God thanks for that." This doesn't sound like he's about to hang an "intact first marriages only" sign on the restaurant window; it sounds like an authentic expression of values in a spirit of thanksgiving.
I'm on record as supporting a morally diverse corporate landscape, and this is a great example of that. There is a price to pay, of course, and Chick-fil-A has to count the cost. (Some of the costs now being inflicted on the company can only be described as both absurd and ominous.) If folks want to boycott the restaurant, that's fine and in keeping with a time-honored American tradition. But let's not pretend that Chick-fil-A is out to divide and demonize its customers.
UPDATE: The folks at Get Religion weigh in on the media coverage.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/07/lets-eat-mor-chikin.html
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I think Milbank is quite right. I have been following this controversy, and I thought the whole thing was pretty silly. I probably would not have participated in a boycott of Chick-fil-A, but if Huckabee is going to turn eating there into a crusade and a show of support for opposition to gays and same-sex marriage, then I'm going to stay away. Huckabee really isn't doing Chick-fil-A any favors. They were trying to gently back out of the whole controversy. Huckabee is tossing gasoline on the flames.
And of course it wasn't just Dan Cathy's remark that Milbank quotes that set things off. While googling, I came across this on the web from months ago:
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Dworkoski [an NYU student] said she got upset after reading several articles about donations from Chick-fil-A’s charitable arm, WinShape, to anti-gay groups. In 2009, WinShape donated $1.7 million to conservative groups that actively work against LGBT rights and marriage equality laws. WinShape gave more than $3 million since 2003 to groups and campaigns with anti-gay agendas.
WinShape has also explicitly stated they do not allow “homosexual couples” at a retreat center they run. . . .
NYU isn’t the first college to have students protest for the removal of a Chick-fil-A location.
According to Change.org, students at the University of North Texas, the University of New Orleans, Mississippi State University, Gainesville State College, Indiana University and Texas Tech University have all launched petitions like Dworkoski’s.
Earlier this week, students at Northeastern University in Boston were successful in getting their school to cancel plans of a campus-based Chick-fil-A location.
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WinShape is on record giving to the following charities (comments in brackets are my own):
* Marriage & Family Foundation: $1,188,380 [Cathy-family owned nonprofit]
* Fellowship Of Christian Athletes: $480,000 [no gays allowed]
* National Christian Foundation: $247,500
* New Mexico Christian Foundation: $54,000
* Exodus International: $1,000 [encourages reparative therapy to "cure" gays]
* Family Research Council: $1,000 [anti-gay, anti-gay marriage]
* Georgia Family Council: $2,500
I am not quite sure how separate a company is from it's "charitable arm," but WinShape can reasonably be described as anti-gay. I am having a hard time finding where money from Marriage & Family Foundation goes, but I suspect that the charities described as strongly supporting traditional marriage are also groups that oppose same-sex marriage.
So it's not just over a quote in a Baptist publication. It's about a company that has a long history of supporting organizations that work against gay rights or exclude gay people.
Of course, any company has a right to support any charities they want to, and there are only a couple of organizations and businesses on my own blacklist. But if pro-lifers have a right to boycott companies that contribute to Planned Parenthood, and conservative Christians can make an effort to eat at Chick-fil-A because it opposes gay rights, then nobody can be blamed for boycotting Chick-fil-A, either.
I think I might have respected Dan Cathy more if he had said, "You know, I don't care if we never sell another chicken sandwich in our lives, I oppose same-sex marriage because that is what God wants." But instead he said, in effect, "You know, we want to feed everyone, and we're going to stay out of public policy debates, so let's all be good to one another." But it looks like Huckabee is throwing a monkey wrench into the whole thing.