President of Chick-fil-A
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. We give God thanks for that. We operate as a family business … our restaurants are typically led by families – some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that … We intend to stay the course. We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles.
–Dan Cathy, President of Chick-Fil-A, Baptist Press, July 16, 2012
Some people have a lot of nerve. Have you ever heard such hate speech? Shocking.
In all seriousness, the food at Chick-fil-A might be a little bland, but its politics are hot and spicy, with an extra helping of political incorrectness. And the Chick-fil-A president’s opinions on marriage have a lot of people’s feathers in a ruffle, and they are starting to squawk.
Two mayors, one from Chicago and the other from Boston, have criticized the political opinions held by Chick-fil-A’s president. No longer will Chick-fil-A be allowed to open a restaurant in Chicago, and forget about Boston. No word yet on other traditional-marriage advocates that have already made it into Boston and Chicago, like Catholic or Baptist churches, or Muslim mosques.
Michael Graham of the Boston Herald had a great scoop, when he pointed out that Boston’s mayor took time out from his anti-Chick-fil-A ranting to help dedicate a Bostonian mosque. According to Graham, when the City of Boston sold the land to the mosque at below-market cost, the mosque followed an imam who advocated the execution of gays. The imam just couldn’t decide whether gays should be thrown from a high place or burned.
The imam eventually settled on stoning gays to death. But yet the mayor of Boston reserves his ire for Christians like Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy, advocate of traditional marriage.
Honestly, what is it with liberals and Christianity? It seems as if Muslim countries can advocate and actually do any kind of torture or killing of gays and women and the average liberal will ignore it and instead find a Christian to hate. And of course it is the Christian who is branded the “hater.”
This Chick-fil-A tempest reminds me of my own Facebook battle a few weeks ago with several liberals who attributed much of anti-gay actions in the world to Christians. Most of the time I ignore political posts like this, but when a liberal friend of mine posted a citation to an article about a Ugandan church that debated imprisoning or executing gays, I had to respond.
“It is horrible that gays are mistreated anywhere, whether by a proposal in Uganda by a few rogue bishops, or by much of the Muslim world, where gays are routinely tortured or executed,” I ventured. Immediately, others in the discussion referred me to other notable Christians and their views on gays, as an explanation as to why Christians “have blood on their hands.”
I responded that whatever the level of gay-hatred from people claiming to be Christian, it is not even close to what really happens to gays in Muslim countries. “Enough hate to go around,” came the reply.
I provided links to websites that chronicle Muslim torturing of women and gays, including one website that had a photo, front and center, of two gays in Iran about to be hanged. A few minutes after the photo was taken, those gays were dead. That photo had to make an impression.
It didn’t. Instead, my opponents provided citations to a story of one Christian pastor who complained that the government won’t kill gays, and to another pastor who advocated quarantining gays.
After some back and forth on glass houses and moral equivalences, I finally got an admission that Christianity is “graded on a curve.” As anyone who has been to sixth grade can tell you, “grading on a curve” means a double-standard in favor of lower-performing students. Bad students get help with their grades while good students get grade reductions.
And this is what is happening not only in the Chick-fil-A controversy but to Christianity in general. Christianity, and any organization like Chick-fil-A that advocates Christian positions, is “graded on a curve,” or given a lower grade than the grade given to Islam and the murderous imam associated with the Boston mosque. That explains it.
And that might be the silver lining to this whole Chick-fil-A controversy: the double-standard exposed for all to see.
Meanwhile, anyone like me who supports Chick-fil-A is expected to participate in this week’s “buy-cott” of Chick-fil-A’s bland food, so I will dutifully join in. My only question is this: what will it take for a chain of Thai restaurants, or maybe a group of Szechuan Chinese restaurants to take the same position so that we can eat at their restaurants? Why is it that the only restaurant that defends traditional marriage also happens to be the purveyor of the most boring food around?