We’ve officially entered the Twilight Zone.
Now, before you grab some fast food on the road, you’ve got to consider what the company’s CEO thinks about gay marriage.
That’s the take of one writer at HuffPost. “If You Really Love LGBTQ People, You Just Can’t Keep Eating Chick-fil-A,” writes Noah Michelson.
Michelson says that as a kid, he couldn’t hide his love of Chick fil-A, just as he was bad at “hiding my insatiable hunger for other boys.”
So you can imagine how upsetting it was for me when Chick-fil-A’s president, Dan Cathy, proudly came out as a homophobe in 2012 by claiming, “We are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,’ and I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.”
Even worse, the company put its money where Cathy’s vile mouth was by donating millions of dollars each year to anti-LGBTQ organizations via its Winshape nonprofit organization.
As disappointed as I was to learn the chain I had loved as a child was working to make my life and the lives of my fellow queers a living hell, I was heartened by the swift response from the queer community and its supporters. For several years, the only time you’d catch an LGBTQ person or an ally at Chick-fil-A was for a protest.
Michelson is distraught that some gay people still eat at the chicken restaurant, saying “people can be disturbingly indignant and defiant when faced with giving up their beloved chicken sandwiches.”
But the writer says not only should gay people not eat there — no one else should, either. “If you care about queer people ― or you yourself are queer ― you have absolutely no business eating at Chick-fil-A. Ever. It’s really that straightforward.”
I’m not saying that in order to be a “good” person or ensure you don’t support despicable businesses, you have to hermetically seal yourself inside your home and only eat food you’ve hydroponically grown and only wear clothes you’ve woven on a loom built using recycled popsicle sticks and the stickier variety of bodily fluids you have handy. I’m saying that when you know a company is anti-queer ― and, what’s more, when a company like Chick-fil-A goes out of its way to tell you as much ― you shouldn’t support them no matter how delicious a reason you can order up.
Michelson says “it sucks that we can’t have waffle fries. But you know what sucks even more? Not having equal rights and contributing to the profits of a company that wants to ensure you never do because it believes you’re fundamentally disordered or unnatural or sinful or some delightful combination of all three.”
That’s the world we now live in. On Sunday, comedian Michael Ian Black posted on Twitter: “Theater is political. Sports is political. Life is political. Be political.”
But he left out one thing: Now, even a chicken sandwich is political, too.
And that’s just sad.