• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Chick-fil-A digging themselves a hole

So...all those lines of glassy eyed, overweight people eating mediocre chicken sandwiches in front of TV cameras and saying "I came out here to stand up for free speech and the American family"...they...they were wrong?

Nah. Can't be. There were too many of them.

:shifty:
 
Except they do. (At least, it certainly looked that way before all involved began to furiously back-pedal once the story broke).

See, they (Chick-fil-a's owners) have openly admitted donating to The Family Research Council which actively lobbied congress to not condemn Uganda's laws which make it legal to kill homosexuals, and makes homosexuality itself a capital crime.

The FRC now maintains that their reasons for opposing the formal condemnation was totally unrelated to the subject of homosexual genocide, but because they objected to language in the Congressional Condemnation that implied that freedom of sexual orientation was a basic human right.

Regardless of their true motivation, the upshot is that FRC opposed the US government's condemnation of this genocidal Ugandan policy, and that Chick-fil-a profits underwrote the FRC's efforts to do so.

The FRC supported a condemnation of Uganada's proposed law, as did just about every other church on the planet, including the Vatican, and were lobbying for a change in the wording. CBS News already covered the controversy.

As an aside, the only House member who voted in opposition to the previous attempt to stop Westboro Baptist Church from staging anti-gay protests at funerals was Barney Frank, but conservatives don't run around claiming that Barney supports Fred Phelps and wants to kill gays.

Meanwhile, what made the Drudge Report today was the LA Times story about the vandalism of a Torrance Chick-Fil-A.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/chick-fil-a-kiss-hate-graffiti-vandalized.html

I guess it was more fun than painting a swastika on a synagogue to make a statement about Gaza.
 
Wow... what a journey this thread has gone on. I didn't take a peek earlier because I could care less about Chick-fil-A (I avoid fast food chains as much as possible), but seeing how this thread kept appearing near the top I finally started reading it. I'm amazed at how ridiculous some people's arguments were (particularly those who support Chick-fil-A) and applaud those who stood on the side of refuting Chick-fil-A. Some excellent responses made.

What always gets to me is how people can "pick and choose" their points and ignore those that undermine their view. I guess it all comes back to the arguments with religion, whereby people will hang on their ethereal interpretations by hook or by crook, logic be damned.

Anyway, I've seen Chick-fil-A restaurants in the corners of various cities and never got the impression that they're anything more than McDonald's meets KFC. But knowing what I do now, I'll never set foot in a CFA. Chicken For Assholes.
 
The FRC supported a condemnation of Uganada's proposed law, as did just about every other church on the planet, including the Vatican, and were lobbying for a change in the wording. CBS News already covered the controversy.

Actually, FRC and Tony Perkins, who just loves to equivocate, stated this:
Inaccurate internet reports have been circulating indicating that the Family Research Council lobbied "against" a congressional resolution condemning a bill proposed in Uganda. The Uganda bill would have provided for the death penalty for something called "aggravated homosexuality." Unfortunately, those spreading these false rumors deliberately failed to obtain the facts first.

FRC did not lobby against or oppose passage of the congressional resolution. FRC's efforts, at the request of Congressional offices, were limited to seeking changes in the language of proposed drafts of the resolution, in order to make it more factually accurate regarding the content of the Uganda bill, and to remove sweeping and inaccurate assertions that homosexual conduct is internationally recognized as a fundamental human right.

FRC does not support the Uganda bill, and does not support the death penalty for homosexuality -- nor any other penalty which would have the effect of inhibiting compassionate pastoral, psychological and medical care and treatment for those who experience same-sex attractions or who engage in homosexual conduct.

Read that carefully...They did NOT support the Uganda bill. They DID lobby for changes in language. They did NOT affirm the death penalty.

This is not convertible with them supporting a condemnation of Uganda's laws regarding homosexuality.

I'll add this as well, FRC is a classic example of one of those organizations where evangelicals can't seem to get on message.

1. Tony Perkins is on record repeatedly asserting that homosexuality is a choice and that people choose their sexuality.

2. Exodus International, while it supports a developmental model of sexuality and its development (that includes biological factors) says repeatedly that it is NOT a choice. That can be found in their material on their website. It's available for anybody to read.

3. FRC promotes Exodus and its ministries to "help" homosexuals.

4. If Tony Perkins and FRC don't believe Exodus why should anybody they send there? Why should anybody believe anything either one has to say, given FRC's spokesperson's incessant contradiction of Exodus? He does more harm to his cause himself than any rebuttal from any gay organization ever could. Every time this comes up when he is on TV the spokespersons for the other side should bring that up.
 
Meanwhile, what made the Drudge Report today was the LA Times story about the vandalism of a Torrance Chick-Fil-A.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/chick-fil-a-kiss-hate-graffiti-vandalized.html

I guess it was more fun than painting a swastika on a synagogue to make a statement about Gaza.

That's at least twice now that you've gone to the Nazi well over this situation (see below). Don't let there be a third time or it will result in another trolling warning. I don't care if you're trying to be funny.

The drive-thru lines for Chick-Fil-A have been reported up to a half-mile long today. The country's largest Wendy's franchisee put up signs saying "Try Chick-Fil-A", probably thinking "First they came for Chick-Fil-A, and nobody spoke up. Then they came for..."
 
CNN has an article about the "kiss-in" protests:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/03/us/chick-fil-a-kiss-day/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

One thing struck me as odd from the article...

McGehee said she hopes someone will protest at each of the more than 1,600 Chick-fil-A locations. Most demonstrators will remain outside, although some have said they plan to take the protest inside, she said. Some plan to buy food with cash marked "gay money," she said.

So let me get this straight... gay people are going to knowingly spend money at a Chick-fil-A, knowing in advance that even though they're doing it in protest, that very money will go directly to supporting anti-gay groups?

I guess I'm kind of confused as to the logic of that tactic.
 
Meanwhile, what made the Drudge Report today was the LA Times story about the vandalism of a Torrance Chick-Fil-A.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/chick-fil-a-kiss-hate-graffiti-vandalized.html

I guess it was more fun than painting a swastika on a synagogue to make a statement about Gaza.

That's at least twice now that you've gone to the Nazi well over this situation (see below). Don't let there be a third time or it will result in another trolling warning. I don't care if you're trying to be funny.

That wasn't meant to be funny, that was serious, though misplaced because it was the Fascists who used threats, government sanctions, and initimidation to instill fear in anyone who opposed their anti-racist agenda.

It was only random luck that the Torrance vandals didn't use the German symbol to denounce Chick-Fil-A as "Nazis", and if this keeps up, within a week on of them will use it, and when they do the headline writers will be free to write their own captions.

The problem with getting people so fired up over so little is that it attracts a lot of hate-filled idiots who go overboard. This has already been happening. People with no sense and no idea how their antics will be perceived have posted Youtube videos of their actions, and this is only feeding public support for Chick-Fil-A, giving the chain victim status and causing a massive outpouring of sympathetic support.

For a hypothetical example, if you support gay rights, you opposed the views of Anita Bryant, who famously denounced gays while she was the spokesman for the Florida Orange Juice council. Back then, if you'd have started showing everyone videos of you driving around town, going up to little girls' sidewalk orange juice stands and punching them in the face, everyone would've rallied in support of Anita Bryant and she wouldn't have been fired.

When the accusation of wrongdoing is weak, nebulous, hard to define, and constantly shifting, but the attacks are simple, clear, and illegal, people make up their minds very quickly about who is the bad guy and who is the good guy.

Taking an example from this page, a very sweet, patient woman working the drive thru was viciously berated, and a different store was physically vandalized, not because she did anything wrong, nor her coworkers, nor her manager, nor her franchise owner, nor the middle management at corporate, nor the CEO, nor the charity the CEO donated money to, nor the charity's lobbyist, nor the US Congress that was lobbied over the wording of a meaningless resolution, nor the Ugandan parliament that was the target of the meaningless resolution, but because someone in the Ugandan parliament proposed an anti-gay bill that won't get voted on. For this, someone here was outraged.

The drive-thru video was posted online, so all people see is a girl getting punched in the face by a person eaten up with hate - over some proposed law that won't pass in Uganda, where there are already more than a million displaced persons living in squalor, constant war, rape, and murder. It's punching random six-year olds in the face, on camera, because you're mad at Anita Bryant.

To win and maintain public support over a victimization issue, yoiu can't throw away victim status by going overboard in your attacks or everyone rallies to the other side. The mayors of Boston and Chicago stupidly went offsides on first down and pissed off the crowd, and the errors have only multiplied since.

That's what happened with the record-setting sales Chick-Fil-A has been having since the boycott started, and why just today in a business meeting I was in, someone said "What we need is a gay boycott," a term that will probably fall into business vernacular as a synonym for winning the lottery.

As I've said, I'm frustrated watching people who intend well, but whose actions are entirely self-defeating. If gays are so upset with Chick-Fil-A, why did they go out and double or triple Chick-Fil-A's revenue? Why did they do so much to convince other franchises to adopt whatever political stand Chick-Fil-A had that made Chick-Fil-A so suddenly popular? Why did they make eating at Chick-Fil-A seem like an act of rebellion, hip, cool, patriotic, and American, all at the same time? Chick-Fil-A could've bought this kind of PR if they'd spent a billion dollars. The drama queens are too self-absorbed to see how the controversy is unfolding in everyone else's eyes.

Martin Luther King, who didn't support gay marriage and donated to Christian charities that supported families, is going to be rewritten as an evil "hater" who worked to suppress civil rights. He was probably worse than Cathy, and all the black civil rights leaders know it, and many agree with him, publically.

To win the issue, you have to carefully pick which hill to fight on, and carefully decide how to fight, and against which opposing forces. Being spastic, random, and rushing forces into an untenable position against overwhelming odds just hastens disaster instead of victory.
 
Martin Luther King, who didn't support gay marriage and donated to Christian charities that supported families, is going to be rewritten as an evil "hater" who worked to suppress civil rights. He was probably worse than Cathy, and all the black civil rights leaders know it, and many agree with him, publically.
I have to assume you're engaging in hyperbole here, since gay marriage wasn't a thing back then.

Also, you keep talking about how this has been good for Chick-fil-A, ignoring that there's no proof of that except in the very short term.
 
I take it gturner, you aren't gay. I am, we have a different perspective on it. There's a reason for that. Calling us "drama queens" and whatnot is one of the most unproductive things you could do, even aside from the Nazi images. In fact, I personally find that insulting. To quote the article, which I suggest you read,
Chick-fil-A is a direct insult, and treating it as anything else requires that gay people either in some way say they're not gay, or consent to a belief that heterosexuals have the right to insult us. These modes of thinking are outdated. In Nora Ephron's commencement speech to Wellesley in 1996, she encouraged women to take slights against other women personally. She's right. Every time someone says faggot or dyke, they're talking about you, every time Dan Cathy says gay relationships are destroying America, he's talking about you and the lady or guy you love. You deserve better than to eat one of his chicken sandwiches. If we don't start taking insults against gays personally, we're never going to earn the right for being gay to just be part of being a person.
 
Last edited:
I have to assume you're engaging in hyperbole here

He is.

All of the "Fascist," "Nazi" and "punched in the face" remarks clearly demonstrate that and introduce a level of discourse into the forum debate I don't think is particularly healthy. And I don't know what the hell we're supposed to make of the Martin Luther King comment near the end of the post. It just came out of left field and seemed completely gratuitous. What was the greater point? Whatever Dr. King personally believed in the context of 1950s and 1960s American culture he believed, right or wrong. But what does he really have to do with the whole Chick-Fil-A situation? And forty-four years after his death, no less?

If someone does at some point maliciously spray paint a swastika on the side of a Chick-fil-A franchise somewhere, worry about and condemn it then. But nothing that inflammatory and bad has yet happened and it might not. What's the point of harping about it like this? A hypothetical situation that might not ever materialize? And the whole Nazi thing...honestly, it just Godwins the entire post. gturner should know after all his time on the boards what injecting Nazism and fascism into a discussion usually results in.

I agree with gturner on the drive-thru girl getting treated like complete and abject crap for nothing more than doing her job and just happening to have to work for a company that funds and tolerates discrimination, but most of the rest of this...

it's just a damn mess.
 
I take it gturner, you aren't gay. I am, we have a different perspective on it. There's a reason for that. Calling us "drama queens" and whatnot is one of the most unproductive things you could do, even aside from the Nazi images.

And that is part of my point. Could you possibly do anything more unproductive to win people to your view than screaming that they're bigots (been called that about two dozen times in this thread), homophobes (I party with gays), haters, oppressors, monsters, racists, throw backs, and medieval idiots, whose opinions are odious, hateful, primitive, ignorant, and close-minded.

Martin Luther King didn't win his struggle by screaming at whites to see how much he could piss them off, or threaten them, or insult them, or threaten their businesses, because he knew that to succeed he had to win them to his side. He also didn't spend all his political capital to target a restaurant that employed and served blacks exactly the same as the white customers, because he wasn't stupid.

You're targeting a restaurant chain whose CEO gave a couple million to a couple organizations that support lots of causes, the most expensive of which, by far, is providing ultrasound machines for women's clinics. If you could've won this battle, you might've cut his funding in half, diverting perhaps $100,000 in ad support against gay marriage. 100 gays could each pitch in a grand and outspend Chick-Fil-A on the issue, but no, they've instead filled Chick-Fil-A's coffers and produced half-mile lines to get chicken and waffle fries, and probably shifted 5% of the middle against gay marriage. You've only stiffened his spine and made all the other chain owners sympathize with him (I'd estimate only 15% of such owners support gay marriage, just based on their age and sex).

As I said, when you shoot yourself in the foot, don't reload and keep shooting.
 
Martin Luther King, who didn't support gay marriage and donated to Christian charities that supported families, is going to be rewritten as an evil "hater" who worked to suppress civil rights. He was probably worse than Cathy, and all the black civil rights leaders know it, and many agree with him, publically.
I have to assume you're engaging in hyperbole here, since gay marriage wasn't a thing back then.

Also, you keep talking about how this has been good for Chick-fil-A, ignoring that there's no proof of that except in the very short term.

Some members of the King family would feel right at home in the Westboro Baptist Church, but probably don't think it's doing enough for the anti-gay struggle. One wrote a book about it, claiming MLK shared their opinion, but some have disputed that because one of MLK's aides was gay.

This will be good for Chick-Fil-A in the long term because they got 15,000 man points and 10,000 family points. Somehow, you've managed to convince about half of the country that Chick-Fil-A is Team USA. Many of those people who were standing in line, setting a world record (or so it is rumored), will keep coming back. For a franchise restaurant, getting people in the door the first time is the key to keeping them coming back. The big bounce will quickly disipate, but their sales level will show a permanent step-change, especially because so many children now think going to Chick-Fil-A is fun, exciting, and socially relevant.

As I've been saying, you have to understand how the opposition thinks, how it reacts, and how it behaves. In war, thousands of generals have been crushed because their battle plans assumed some imaginary, simple-minded, dim-witted opponent who would cringe in fear of their stern glances. To run an effective psychological campaign you have to know how the opposition thinks, and to do that, you have to be able to think like the opposition, to know how they'll perceive what they see, and how they'll react. None of you, not one, predicted a record-setting day, perhaps world-record setting day, for Chick-Fil-A. You are failing to understand and predict public reaction, and failing profoundly.

Even some of the pro-gay-rights pundits whose articles were posted in this thread were giving dire warnings that this campaign would backfire - badly.

Going back to Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, the general who is utterly flumoxed finds all sorts of reasons to dismiss dire warnings of impending disaster. Advisors try to warn him. Scouts bring back very disturbing report, but he dismisses all such contrary data with a wave of his hand, confident that these must be erroneous and that the day will transpire just as he'd envisioned. A truly blind general can get enveloped on both flanks and have a huge enemy force show up in his rear, one that he didn't know existed, and still think he's bound to win, given a little more time.

The immediate risk in the current situation is frustration. As people keep flocking to Chick-Fil-A, and as the founder stands by his guns, the protesters are going to get very frustrated. Many of them will assume that they just haven't been extreme enough, loud enough, or visual enough, so some will step things up a level or two. It will go downhill from there.
 
The immediate risk in the current situation is frustration. As people keep flocking to Chick-Fil-A, and as the founder stands by his guns, the protesters are going to get very frustrated. Many of them will assume that they just haven't been extreme enough, loud enough, or visual enough, so some will step things up a level or two. It will go downhill from there.

I do agree that being as loud as possible isn't always the correct solution to a situation like this. Especially in a country that isn't as progressive as everyone thinks.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top