Thursday, July 19, 2012

Chick-Fil-A Goes Its Own Way

Actually, Chick-Fil-A restaurants lost me as a customer long ago. I don't know what a restaurant chain has to do with laws about marriage. They sell the same food to everybody, don't they? And that's my problem. Last time I checked, all their food contained wheat. All their chicken fillets are "breaded" and then wrapped in bread. Nothing gluten-free on the menu.

This story came in from at least three sources; this link to the first one was arbitrarily chosen for you because I don't have enough online time to compare the other stories and offer you the best one. As noted, I don't currently have enough online time to do this web site justice.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/chick-fil-a-dubbed-hate-mongers-after-president-says-they-oppose-gay-marriage/

But I do feel a need to comment on three separate points in Madeleine Morgenstern's story:

1. Disagreeing with a political agenda (or being sucked into a meaningless political debate that's being used to distract attention from more important things) is very, very different from hate. People who confuse the two things are showing that they have no experience of being hated.

The only reasonable response, when homosexual lobbyists try to shove themselves into the list of historical victim groups, is to laugh. Slavery, concentration camps, rape, the Trail of Tears, being denied votes or property rights...and not getting your mock weddings taken seriously by people who understand marriage as a way families unite around an intention of producing mutual heirs? Can you guess which thing is not like the others by the time we finish this song?

2. The president of Chick-Fil-A imagines that not opening restaurants on Sunday is a pro-Christian, pro-family statement. I think it's a bit more narrow than that. If all the restaurant employees belong to churches that meet on Sunday, then supporting their right to observe a full day of rest, worship, and family time is a good thing. Jews and Muslims, arguably, "should" not be interested in Chick-Fil-A at all, since the meat doesn't meet kosher or halal standards. But what about Christians who belong to churches that meet on Saturday? (At least five Protestant denominations do.)

3. Ed Helms imagines that the meat industry has some special treatment for "gay chickens." Ed Helms obviously knows nothing about the meat industry. The chickens from whom our fillets are mass-produced are crowded together in single-sex environments, and most of them are males deliberately fed massive doses of female hormones, both of which might produce homosexuality if the birds were allowed to live long enough to have any sexuality of any kind. They're not. If Ed Helms were aware of the practices of commercial chicken "farms," his reactions might become newsworthy.

And if Chick-Fil-A would use its corporate weight for something relevant to its corporate reason for existing--such as serving the public fillets of chickens who hadn't been pumped full of estrogen and antibiotics, who had lives that can be described in terms that don't sound like torture--then, although I personally can't eat their sandwiches, I might be able to post something favorable to Chick-Fil-A.

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