Okay, I'm officially tired of the Chick-fil-A story. I really shouldn't be, though. This kind of stupid is the sort of thing that has been driving my writing for damn near a decade. Shit, it's been driving my life for the better part of forty years. This is one of those increasingly common instances where everybody is wrong, misguided, stupid, or all three.
As I explained in my previous post, I think Dan Cathy is a coward. If he owned and operated his restaurants or if Chick-fil-A was a publicly traded company, I doubt that he would be showing the courage of his convictions the way that he is.
Instead, he's forcing independent franchisees to take the hit for him. And am I the only one who's wondering how Dan would feel if those franchisees put out press releases saying that he's full of shit? How far would their free speech rights be respected? Would national Republicans be standing up for their rights en masse? Of course they wouldn't.
The conservative "free speech movement" is every bit as duplicitous as the liberal one is and it's time someone called them on it.
Yes, if only Chick-fil-A had the same commercial speech rights as the Dixie Chicks.
You catch that? A sitting President of the United States said that they "shouldn't be hurt" if someone that didn't like their speech doesn't buy their product. And there was no shortage of conservatives that boycotted the Dixie Chicks. Because they were a country band with a base in the South, their career was basically destroyed because of it.
So far as I'm aware, Barack Obama hasn't commented on Chick-fil-A, and this is the first time that he hasn't spouted off on nonsense that doesn't concern his office.
While I'm on the topic, this isn't just about gay marriage. If Dan Cathy is the God-fearing Christian that he portrays himself to be, and places his marriage statements on "biblical definitions," it follows that he just doesn't like queers very much because the Bible certainly doesn't. But he doesn't have the balls to say that, does he? The chapters of Bible relating to gays don't mention their marrying at all. But it does sanction their being killed. Absent scripture, it's logically difficult to oppose gay marriage, and scripture clearly teaches that gays should be put to death.
Based on that alone, I can hardly fault gays or the people that support their rights for not wanting to eat there. More importantly. superstitious Republicans were lining up in support of Chick-fil-A's stand before there was a wider controversy. Mike Huckabee, who once opinied that the Bill of Rights should be replaced with the Ten Commandments, started the stupid idea that Jesus types eat there today before anyone else piled on.
As I write this, half of all Americans support gay marriage. Pretty much everyone knows or loves a gay person at this point. Dan Cathy is playing to Southern evangelical yokels, which is his primary customer base. But that base, regardless of what shithead radio talk-show hosts and hucktering politicians wish to be true, is shrinking dramatically.In making the statement he did, Cathy limited his own company's growth potential. If you wonder why I can't bother getting so upset about this, now you know.
But liberals, being liberals, couldn't just shut the fuck the up and let the market take care of itself, could they?
Of fucking course they couldn't! This is because liberals are every bit as obtrusive, dumb and counter-productive as social conservatives are.
Liberals are worse though, because they wanted to being the power of the government into a philosophical and commercial dispute. So far as anyone knows, Chick-fil-A isn't breaking any laws, but statist liberals want to punish the company simply for what it chooses to say.
But that's a double-edged sword. What if a Southern town wanted to use its zoning power to block a business that openly supported gay marriage? By their very standard, there's absolutely nothing to stop them from doing so. This is what happens when you rely on government If Rahm Emanuel's "Chicago values" (which are odd, since he worked for two presidents who opposed gay marriage) can be applied against Chick-fil-A. there's nothing to stop, say, Mississippi's values from being applied against a more gay-friendly enterprise.
That's not to say that anti-homo Chick-fil-A conservative supporters aren't idiots. There isn't a court in the United States that wouldn't slap any of the liberal politicians that want to stop Chick-fil-A the fuck down. Social conservatives want to use this as a rallying cry, and liberals are stupidly enabling them to do just that.
You know why people hate liberals? Because they make it so easy for the dumber breed of conservatives to win.
I actually agree with liberals on most social issues precisely because I don't think that personal behaviour is any of the government's fucking business. Where liberals lose me is that they rely on the power of government to stifle speech when it can be easily defeated in the marketplace of ideas.
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