Chick-fil-A boycott misguided; tolerance has to run both ways

By David McElroy · July 26, 2012

When most people demand “tolerance” of others, they really mean they insist that others accept their own positions — and then they’re outraged if positions contrary to their own are actually tolerated.

I keep thinking about that when I read about the gay activists who are leading obsessive boycotts of the fast food chain, Chick-fil-A. For decades, these same gay activists have demanded that everyone show toleration of their sexual orientation. There was a time when gays and lesbians were horribly mistreated by the law. We’re not living in that day, and it’s silly to pretend that we are. (I’ve argued that the state has no business defining marriage and dictating who can marry, so I’m not in a camp that wants to legally define marriage in any particular way.)

Activists are angry with Chick-fil-A because the private company’s owners have given money to Christian groups, some of which have favored efforts to legally define marriage as being between a man and a woman. The activists say this isn’t just a disagreement. No, it’s “hate,” they say. They don’t give any evidence that Chick-fil-A hates anyone. They simply define disagreement with their view as hatred. It’s hard to imagine a more insane twisting of what words really mean.

Politicians pandering to the activists — some of whom are probably genuinely outraged personally by the company’s stance — have started promising to use the power of law to stop Chick-fil-A, all because those politicians disagree with a political stance of a company’s owners. Who exactly are the “intolerant” people these days?

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino sent an angry letter to Chick-fil-A and has promised to use zoning tricks to stop the company from opening locations in the city. In Chicago, a city alderman is trying to deny Chick-fil-A a business permit to open in his district, and he openly says it’s because of the company owners’ stance on gay marriage. And Thursday morning, it was reported that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is also attacking the company and trying to prevent it from opening in the city — all because he disagrees with the political views of company management.

Politicians using the force of law to punish companies which hold sincere political views different from their own are vile. They’re asserting the right to use the power of the state to enforce their own views, which is exactly what they’re complaining about the other side doing. Let’s be honest, though. The people who want state control of everything — whether it’s marriage or safety or anything else — aren’t really worried about principles or rights. They’re interested in outcomes. The politicians who are grandstanding here don’t care about rights. They merely care about their views being enforced by law. Isn’t that what they complain about the Religious Right trying to do?

And even if you aren’t trying to use the force of law to compel compliance, do you really want to live in a world where everyone only does business with others who they agree with?

If I go to a restaurant, I’m interested in whether the place serves food I want at a price I’m willing to pay. I’m interested in how I’m treated there. I’m interested in whether I like the people who serve me. On all of those points, Chick-fil-A shines. They have excellent fast food. They’re obsessive in insisting that employees treat customers well. Their training is legendary in this regard, and they’re better than any other chain I know of at getting rid of problem employees in order to deliver a consistently good experience. They’re not perfect, but I know of no other place that comes close.

(I’ll especially give credit to the Chick-fil-A locations in Trussville, the Birmingham suburb where I live, and in Leeds, just a bit south of me. It’s hard to see how anybody could beat the service that these two stores routinely provide for their customers.)

If I go to a dry cleaner, I care about whether the folks there can clean my clothes. When I go to get a haircut — from a gay guy, by the way — I’m interested in whether he cuts my hair well, not with what he does on his own time or what his political views might be. If I go to a grocery store, I’m interested in whether the place has the products I want to buy and prices I can afford, not whether the company management might disagree with me about foreign policy or taxation (both of which I consider moral issues).

I’m treated well at Chick-fil-A and I like the service and the people. In addition, one of my very favorite people happens to be a manager at the Chick-fil-A in my neighborhood — and he’s gay. Everybody there knows that. It’s never been an issue. He’s not treated any differently than anybody else. And customers are treated the same whether they might be gay or not. It’s a well-run company that treats its employees and customers well. Whether you agree with the company owners’ position on marriage or not, Chick-fil-A is an excellent company.

It wasn’t that long ago that the Southern Baptist Convention — the nation’s largest protestant denomination — participated in an eight-year boycott of Disney over the company’s pro-gay and alleged anti-Christian stance. The boycott was spearheaded by a Religious Right group called the American Family Association and the Baptists followed. In 2006, the groups finally ended the boycott, making vague noises about it having been effective. Nobody really believed that — and it was a terrible idea from the start.

If you want to boycott a company because you disagree with the company’s management on political or religious issues — and you demand that other people do the same — I think you’re the one who’s being intolerant.

Note: The Atlantic had an article last week that I also recommend on the issue of the Chick-fil-A boycott. In addition, Glenn Greewald has an excellent article today on the free speech implications of Rahm Emanuel’s political attack.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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