Chick-fil-A says it set a sales record on Wednesday, the day that supporters rallied around the fast-food chain amid a debate over its president’s opposition to same-sex marriage. The chain won’t release sales numbers, but “we can confirm reports that it was a record-setting day,” said Steve Robinson, Chick-fil-A’s executive vice president of marketing. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee had called on people to buy food at the chain on Wednesday, which he dubbed “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” after a backlash against the company and their president.
Say what you will about Chick-Fil-A being bad fast food. As far as I’m concerned it is, and I wouldn’t eat there even if I wasn’t a vegan. The real story here isn’t the collective poor taste in food shown by Americans. It’s the collective willingness to get in line behind a company that stands for hatred and discrimination in the name of “Christian values.” That those claiming the mantle of Christianity to justify their bigotry understand nothing of the teachings of the Jesus Christ they profess to revere is as sad as it is hypocritical. Chick-Fil-A and their supporters stand for hatred, bigotry, and oppression, which have nothing to do with love, charity, and tolerance, which actually ARE Christian values. This isn’t about Christian values or leading a Christ-like life. Not at all. It’s about oppressing and hating a minority class in order that you might feel more pious and superior to those whose beliefs and lifestyle you despise and find “icky.”
Wednesday’s silliness offered proof that far too many Americans are OK with the idea of treating the LGBT community as second-class citizens. If you go back 50 years and substitute “Blacks” for “LGBT community,” you’d understand that we haven’t really come very far at all. We treat homosexuals today in much the same way we treated Black men and women during the ’60s. It would seem that, without a minority class to hate and feel superior to, Americans are at a loss. We have to be able to hold ourselves to be above others, to be better than them; equality means that we can no longer hold a minority class down and deny them basic rights that we take for granted. How can White, Christian, Heterosexual, Conservative American Patriots ensure that they will continue to enjoy primacy if equality is the rule?
I’m proud to be an American, but Wednesday was a day that left me ashamed of my country and the ease with which we hate The Other. I’d naively thought we’d matured, but I’m realizing that there are still far too many knuckle-dragging haters among us, people for whom equality is anathema. They claim to be “Christian” while clearly having NO intention of living a Christ-like life, all while blithely looking past their hypocrisy and ignorance of the teachings of the religion they profess to follow.
Love, charity, and tolerance are reserved for those who think, look, act, believe, and love as the majority of White America does. Fall outside that norm, and the haters will line up for miles to make a statement demonstrating how much they hate what they can’t be bothered to understand. A couple million bad chicken sandwiches later, White, Christian, Heterosexual, Conservative American Patriots can once again bask in their self-ascribed moral superiority.
Enjoy the heartburn, y’all….
