There has been a lot of conversation about Chick-fil-A recently and my Facebook news feed is full of diverging opinions on the issue. One of my very dear, childhood friends has even posted in support of the corporation. On one hand, I completely support freedom of speech and will defend Chick-fil-A's right to say whatever they believe without fear of repercussions from the government, Mayor of Boston I'm looking at you. On the other, I have every right not to patronize that establishment and support those views or help fund those organizations that Chick-fil-A finances. But those aren't even the issues anymore. We're not fighting about freedom of speech, we're fighting about religion and who is more right than whom.
My friend's reasons are that Chick-fil-A supports the "biblical" definition of marriage and isn't afraid to stand up for its beliefs. She sees it as Daniel in the lion's den, being persecuted for the same Christian beliefs she has. This makes me sadder than Chick-fil-A Dan Cathy's announcement that they're "guilty as charged." It means that she also subscribes to the belief that homosexuality is against God and doesn't support same-sex marriage rights at all; that all of the conversations we've had are for naught. When my dad first came out to me, she was the first friend I told and it was never a big deal or a problem. It's only been after her marriage that we've started to disagree on these issues. I would say it's the influence of her husband, but her mother shared the exact same posts on Facebook. So perhaps I didn't really know her as well as I thought I did.
Part of the Dan Cathy announcement was that they believed in the "biblical" definition and all of Chick-fil-A's executives were married to their first wives. The implication is that the "biblical" definition of marriage doesn't include divorced/remarried and when they support Families, they don't include single parent households. When we start setting up these definitions of what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to love and family, where do we draw the line? Now, it is the LGBT community but it could just as easily be divorcees or interracial couples.
Then we come to the organizations that are actually being funded by a Chick-fil-A purchase. I don't want to support organizations that hate my family or would have rather seen me grow up in foster care than in the environment I did. (To be fair, my step-parent from age 14-24 was like a villain in a fairy tale but that had little to do with my dad being gay and everything to do with his partner being an asshole. If the step-parent had been married to my mother I'd have endured the same trauma.) I don't want to give money so that kids can be tortured into acting straight. I have a friend, who had first hand experience with Exodus International and it breaks my heart to know he, or any child, had to endure that.
The thing that really frightens me, though, is the rhetoric that is being used. It is far more damaging and dangerous than people realize. In this argument about whether or not people should boycott Chick-fil-A, the religious conservatives are using language that attempts to dehumanize homosexuals. When an organization or government succeeds in convincing the public that this or that group is less than human, there is no end to the atrocities that will be committed against those people. I think about Nazi Germany at times like these. It wasn't as if the entire country woke up one morning and thought let's put Jewish people in camps. It started with the little things in society and worked its way up to political campaigns. An entire nation allowed a group of human beings to be beaten, tested on, and murdered because they were convinced, over time, that those people were subhuman.
I would like to think that couldn't possibly happen again, especially on that kind of scale and especially in this country. But the hatred that is brewing in our borders (not just against the LGBT community but also the anger at foreign nationals and immigrants, as well as the animosity between the races, political parties, social classes, and even religious organizations) it feels like that cycle could start again. The economy isn't great, it's getting better, but it's still a long road. People are frustrated with the speed of recovery, but we're not the only country that's suffering. All of these things could be ingredients for that level of violence if we're not conscious of it.
