By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
The feathers hit the fan over chicken this week. Distracting from more worrisome problems with an enviable cast of characters, the Muppets rethought a Chick-fil-A agreement to produce toys for kids’ meals, Mayor Rahm Emanuel decided CFA was not a Chicago-kind-a-business (discounting his city’s impressive history of graft and goodfellas with a wink and a smile) and Roseanne Barr tweeted a dire prophesy of cancer-riddled doom for all those who eat “antibiotic filled tortured chickens 4 Christ.” Could this political season be any more inane, you ask? No — probably not — and yes, you guessed correctly: the president of Chick-fil-A, Dan Cathy, is a fundamentalist who believes the nation is defying Gawd Almighty by approving same-sex marriage and daring to rethink Biblical interpretation of family life.
As you might suspect, Cathy is a radical who provides millions for a ‘pro-marriage’ — read that ‘anti-gay’ — charity he established and promotes ‘ex-gay’ therapy, along with promise rings for teen girls and other formal trappings of the Christocracy. Other of his corporate donations have gone into the coffers of hate groups, some of which want gays exported, while a good bit of it has gone to fight employment discrimination law suits. Hardly surprising behavior from this company, as their history precedes them. Cathy’s father and Chick-fil-A’s founder, Truett, once stated that he would fire “the sinful,” and in 2007, Forbes magazine called Chick-fil-A a cult. Well, different strokes: PETA would call it a mass murderer.
And yes, here in the USA, the Cathys have every right to say this kind of stuff. They also have the right to close on Sundays and even allow Mike Huckabee to promote a Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day in celebration of a company “willing to take a stand for the Godly values we espouse.” In these tight circles, Yahweh is a homophobe, and his faithful are created in his image (but why they call themselves Christians is a quandary; the Jesus portion of the Bible seems to get short shrift, but I guess they can’t call themselves Jews, with most religious Jews having long ago delved into the mysteries of their holy books and separated the wheat from the chaff.)