Chickening Out
A friend of mine was driving down Sunset last night and got stuck in a horrible traffic jam. Turns out it was due to the Chick-Fil-A appreciation/protest. If you haven't heard, owner Dan Cathy strongly opposes same-sex marriage and has even put his money where his mouth is. The mayors of Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. have attacked him for his views, and even stated that they'd like--in varying degrees--to prevent Chick-Fil-A from moving into their city. In response to these attacks, others called for people to show up and eat.
I think many people were driven to sample Chick-fil-A by the mistaken belief that this is a “free speech/freedom of religion” issue, not a matter of a for-profit corporation funneling money into a non-profit corporation.
I'm sorry, but as long as you've got government officials threatening someone for expressing his views--views protected by the First Amendment--this is a free speech issue. I suggest the mayors apologize. After that, let people decide to visit or not visit Chick-Fil-A based on their own conscience (and stomach).
posted by LAGuy @ 12:13 AM
6 Comments:
Anti gay marriage businesses have acheived the status of segregation boosters and holocaust deniers.
I think McDonalds is behind the protests. Their Southern Style Chicken sandwich is a pale comparison to the Chick-Fil-A sandwich.
Apropos of something else, I just browsed through the top 100 software sellers for students on Amazon.
Excluding about 75 percent being language packages, mostly Rosetta Stone, and another 20 percent being typing, you had pretty much five left: 1 dictionary (MW), 1 encyclopedia (Britanica), 1 style manual (APA), 1 complete set of National Geographic since 1888 (Cool, only like $15 to $40, I forget) AND . . . drumroll . . . Final Draft.
Don't know what Final Draft is?
Scripts.
Not Perl scripts, either.
No, for our youth today, the future of the economy is movie scripts.
One more thing.
Typing?
Why does anyone need typing?
I thought it was all done with thumbs now?
Anonymous # 1 wrote: Anti gay marriage businesses have acheived the status of segregation boosters and holocaust deniers.
In many ways this is true.
But it's bizarre. Holocaust deniers have probably never been as high as 1% of the population. People who supported segregation had become a fast-declining minority before they became social pariahs. But those who oppose gay marriage are roughly half the country (or more, by some counts), including the President himself until a couple weeks ago.
My intuition is that these folks are overplaying their hand. The mayor of D.C. is unsurprisingly surrounded by gay marriage supporters, and (more surprisingly) Rahm Emmanuel seems to be as well. I think this has made them overestimate the popularity of their viewpoint. This normally doesn't happen in American politics, where people try to appeal to the middle. But it often happens among radicals: the French Revolutionaries in 1792 who saw how popular they were in Paris and concluded that the rest of France was ready to have Christianity and class society abolished, and the American radicals in 1969 who thought that an actual youth-led revolution was around the corner. This overreach inevitably leads to backlash.
But there might be another factor. At the time of the black civil rights movement, African-Americans had very little economic or political power. By contrast, in 2012 gays are not allowed to marry in many states, but economically they play a significant role in Democratic politics and fundraising. Perhaps the mayors who bash Chik-fil-A are simply pandering to these potential donors?
I actually give credit to Obama and Emanuel and other Demicratic leaders for believing this is today's major constitutional rights issue. If I believed that denial of marriage licenses for same sex couples (or any couples, even related family couples) was a denial of an inalienable right (like the right of free association), I would be right there supporting a Constitutional challenge to State and Federal laws that only grant benefits to opposite sex, non-related, non-married couples over 16-18 years of age.
But I come at the issue from a different angle (one that I don't think very many people, especially Democrats, see the same way). The marriage license is a gov't ticket to certain benefits, just like a driver's license is a ticket to drive on public highways. It can be given to any couples or groups that society wants to give it to, but as long as distinctions in qualifications are not arbitrary or capricious, there is no illegal discrimination in the distinctions.
Now the gay marriage lobby sees this issue in a third, different way. They see it as a wedge to gain greater acceptance of an alternate life style, which is true. It bothers me to see them try to make this a Constitutional issue (as racial equal rights clearly were), but I'm all for Obama and the Democratic platform seeking repeal of DOMA and state limitations on issuing gay mariage certificates. Was it Churchill who said "Give Americans a choice and they will make the correct choice, once all other options have been tried." (Massive paraphrase).
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