In late July and early August, I wrote a couple of posts about American coronary factory Chick-fil-A's marketing fiasco regarding their corporate stand on gays. You can read them here and here. One thing that should be made perfectly clear is that this wasn't about Dan Cathy's personal stands because the donations in question were made by Chick-fil-A as a business. Indeed, if the company was publicly traded, its stockholders would very probably have shown the Cathy family the door, if not actually had them executed.
You see, for businesses to involve themselves in public controversies that don't direct affect them is just bad business. No matter what you say, you're almost guaranteed to alienate half of your market. Who in the fuck needs that?
Of course, liberals just had to be liberals and refused to let the market take care of itself. A few mouthy mayors just had to threaten to complicate Chick-fil-A's future expansion, which immediately made this a First Amendment issue instead of whether or not Chick-fil-A were mouthbreathing tools. Even I took Chick-fil-A's side on that.
The reason that liberals are singularly incapable of bringing half the population to their point of view is that they have to make things far more complicated than they are and insist on a bureaucratic solution for everything, whereas normal human beings would much rather brawl it out in the marketplace of ideas. Not only is government not always the solution, it only very rarely ever is.
I remain convinced that, barring the fuckheaded interference of liberals, the market would have taken care of the story in less than a week. Yes, you might have had some semi-mongoloids who actually like looking like bigoted assholes marching in support of the company, but you would not have had Fox News, the fucking Tea Party and every glory-hound dickhead blogger on earth determined to make them a zillion dollars in a day.
Reasonable people would have thought about it and very quietly said to themselves, "I have close friends, co-workers and family members who are gay. I can't see a single plausible reason that some fucking fast-food restaurant would go out of their way to fuck with them, so I don't think I want to give them my money. If they want to make a public issue out of their superstitious stupidity, we'll see how well that works out for them."
That's how this story should have played out. And that's why everybody hates liberals.
Instead, we wound up with Fox News broadcasting a 24-hour marathon of people lining up for hours to throw money at Don Cathy. Even has-beens like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin managed to wring their lusted-after sixteenth minute of fame out of it.
And those people weren't wrong in doing so. It no longer was an issue of whether or not Chick-fil-A was evil, the question had become one of the power and reach of ward-heeling assholes in Boston, New York and Chicago. And that was a question people who wanted to call Chick-fil-A out weren't ever going to win. Ever.
After the hugely profitable "Chick-Fil-A Anti-Gay Day," the story gleefully disappeared. Even I dropped it, mostly because that's when I thought that things were going to get interesting.
And guess what?
Chick-fil-A has pledged to stop giving money to anti-gay groups and to back off political and social debates after an executive’s comments this summer landed the fast-food chain smack in the middle of the gay marriage debate.
The Civil Rights Agenda, which dubs itself the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group in Illinois, said Chick-fil-A agreed in meetings to stop donating to groups such as Focus on the Family and the National Organization for Marriage. Such groups oppose same-sex marriage.
The LGBT collective said the Atlanta-based restaurant chain also sent a letter, signed by its senior director of real estate, to Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno.
Chick-fil-A said in the missive that its nonprofit arm, the WinShape Foundation, “is now taking a much closer look at the organizations it considers helping, and in that process will remain true to its stated philosophy of not supporting organizations with political agendas,” according to TCRA.That still hasn't work out the way I would have liked because of the involvement of Moreno, one of the ward-heelers that threatened zoning prohibitions on Chick-fil-A. The yokels are still going to be able to say that they made a business decision solely because of government pressure. And by copying Moreno on the letter, Chick-fil-A furthers that narrative.
If private advocacy groups like The Civil Rights Agenda figure that they have the market juice to put a gun to Chick-fil-A's head, fine. After all, that's the kind of shit that the Family Research Council and the fucking awful Catholic League try to pull all the time.
But it's never going to be a clean victory for those of us who thought that Chick-fil-A were being mouth-breathers precisely because of the weight that the fucking government threw into the fight. Those of us who thought that the company was engaging in half-witted religious grandstanding are never going to be able to say that the marketplace actually won because we'll never be able to prove it.
Did I mention that this is why everybody hates liberals?
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