Dear Chick-Fil-A: Would You Like a Cookie?

Posted on September 20, 2012 by wellsdc

Your waffle-fry powers are useless on me

Chick-Fil-A apparently announced this week that it will no longer give huge gobs of money to anti-gay groups, according to an advocacy group in Chicago.

Of course, it also turns out that the company’s, ahem, charitable foundation, the WinShape Foundation, promoted a fundraiser for an anti-gay group earlier this week, according to The Advocate (h/t Louren).

This reminds me of all the times I have sworn that the chili cheeseburger in my hand is my last one before I start my diet and exercise regimen. (I say that a lot.) Chick-Fil-A will stop funding anti-gay groups, but they’re just so damn tasty!!! (This is a fun metaphor.)

Allow me to give Chick-Fil-A the benefit of the doubt however, and presume that they really, really mean it this time, and they’re really, really going to stop giving money to those anti-gay groups, you know, after this event is over. (To be fair, The Advocate reported that WinShape asked donors not to send checks to them, but directly to the Marriage and Family Foundation. Because telling people where to send their money is completely different from collecting it yourself, amirite?)

So Chick-Fil-A will stop giving money to these groups. Congratulations, Chick-Fil-A, you have taken your first step towards basic human decency.

Do you want a cookie or something?

I’m serious. All you have done with this announcement is meet the baseline standard of common human decency. This does not make you a good company, nor does it make your leaders good people. I hesitate even to say it makes them “not-bad” people. Just as no one got major props for not clubbing baby seals anymore, all you get from me for this is a “well it’s about damn time.”

You’ve started to prove that you have the capacity to not be dicks (you’re not there yet, though.) Now impress us.

Photo credit: ‘Chick-Fil-A Fries’ by J. Reed (Flickr) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Right Wing Has Its Chick-Fil-A Moment

Posted on September 16, 2012 by wellsdc

After the big Chick-Fil-A debacle of this summer, in which right wingers around the country stood firmly in support of a large restaurant chain’s First Amendment right to support the execution of gay people in Uganda. Now, the tables have turned, and a different corporation has done something equally vile and despicable, something that strikes at the very moral fiber of the American soul.

Via io9.com

I’m kidding, of course. Dr. Pepper made reference to evolution in a recent ad, and some people on the right have lost their shit.

Dr. Pepper isn’t exactly my favorite soft drink on the market right now, anyway. Well, technically, it is my favorite soft drink, taste-wise, but its douchetastic Dr. Pepper 10 marketing scheme is still stuck in my craw. How fragile is the whole concept of masculinity if a separate drink is required for dudes, with a mere ten calories that have to be separately categorized as “manly”? I can drink Diet Dr. Pepper and Coke Zero without it affecting my gender identity.

Back to the evolution ad, “Evolution of Flavor.” It’s not even a very good ad. Also, I don’t think the backlash is quite as profound as that faced by Chick-Fil-A (and deservedly so.) As Robert T. Gonzalez puts it at io9:

There’s an important distinction separating Dr Pepper from Kraft and Chick-Fil-A: the soda company’s tongue is planted so firmly in its cheek here that it’s practically poking through the other side. This is not about Dr Pepper pronouncing its pro-evolutionary stance, it’s about selling soda with some high-concept ad-design. This shit’s not even scientifically accurate, for crying out loud; conflating this ad with a pro-evolutionary agenda is insulting to actual concepts surrounding human evolution.

If that analysis seems obvious to you, congratulations. You are capable of dissecting the subtleties of an ad campaign (which, let’s face it, really aren’t that subtle) that has thrown a considerable segment of the internet into one of the dumbest shouting matches in recent memory.

I’m going to skip the actual shouting match, because it’s pretty one-sided and entirely stupid.

Besides, everyone knows that evolution played out like this:

Rice University and that Place that Sells Chicken

Posted on September 10, 2012 by wellsdc

I just learned from an alert friend that Rice University, of which I am a proud alumnus, has an at-least-somewhat cozy relationship with The Chicken Restaurant That Shall Not Be Named. (That’s too wordy, on second thought. I’m referring to Chick-Fil-A.) As of this afternoon, the Rice Athletic Department lists Chick-Fil-A as a “Preferred Restaurant Partner.”

Screen Shot 2012-09-10 at 1.07.59 PM

I couldn’t find much else about a relationship between Rice and Chick-Fil-A, except one indication, via student reviews of campus food, that Chick-Fil-A is available on campus.

Screen Shot 2012-09-10 at 1.15.15 PM

This is what roughly five minutes of Googling revealed, anyway.

My involvement as an alumnus with Rice is pretty minimal. I send money now and then, but I’m not a “patron,” “booster,” or “donor,” so much as I am the guy who pretends to have a forty year-old rotary phone whenever the Rice Development Office calls. Nonetheless, I am not thrilled in the least with the school’s affiliation with Chick-Fil-A, which, as far as I am concerned, goes against everything I learned about tolerance and inclusion while a student at Rice. I matriculated at Rice as a spoiled, entitled, sheltered little shit whose life experiences mostly involved fellow WASPs. By the time I graduated, I was still a little shit, but my Rice experience allowed me to expand beyond everything else. Rice’s diversity accounted for about 90% of that. (I now know that Rice actually wasn’t all that diverse, but you have to think like 18 year-old me here.) I mean not only cultural, ethnic, racial, or religious diversity, but also diversity of lifestyles.

Rice is a private university. This means that it has considerable discretion to decide with whom it associates. No one disputes that. As a private organization, however, it also has considerable leeway to decide with whom not to associate. Are you listening, President David Leebron and Athletic Director Rick Greenspan?

BONUS: See Culturemap Houston’s guide to non-Chick-Fil-A chicken in Houston.

Taking Things Too Far: Chick-fil-A Edition

Posted on August 3, 2012 by wellsdc

I’ve been working on a post on the varyingly creative misinterpretations of the First Amendment that have abounded over the past few weeks, but it’s not quite done yet. Sooner or later, someone opposed to Chick-fil-A’s antics, and the antics of its supporters, was bound to spout off at the wrong target. Via Hemant Mehta:

In the wake of the Chick-fil-A controversy, one of the ways the pro-gay-marriage side is fighting back is through the “National Same Sex Kiss Day at Chick-Fil-A” taking place today.
Another way to fight back is to follow the (half-joking) advice of YouTuber Jackson Pearce: Go to Chick-fil-A and ask for a glass of water, which they will give you for free (it’s the Biblical thing to do!), so you’re essentially taking money from them…

(It would be even better if people bought food at KFC and handed it out to homeless people or something… You know, whatever Christians say Jesus would do while they go stuff themselves with some chikin.)

Anyway, Arizona native Adam M. Smith went to a Chick-fil-A drive-thru this week to get the free water. But that wasn’t all. He also lashed out at the employee who served him for the faults of the company and its COO… as if she had anything to do with the matter.

[Here he embedded a video that Smith took of the whole encounter and uploaded to YouTube]

As I watched that, I just felt bad for the employee. She handled the situation perfectly — she did her job, remained as neutral as possible, and tried to explain how the company didn’t discriminate against gay customers (which is true)… meanwhile, Smith came off as a heartless bully (“I don’t know how you live with yourself and work here”). If Chick-fil-A has a problem, this employee had nothing to do with it and he’s wrongly taking his anger out on her. She showed far more class than he did.

For the record, I think it would be great if every Chick-fil-A employee who opposes the company’s stance were to quit en masse, but the world is not such a straightforward place. Jobs are scarce enough that this is not always, or even often, a reasonable demand. I cannot tell anyone else how to react to Chick-fil-A, but I cannot shake the feeling that this form of protest (if you want to call it that) could backfire terribly.

With that in mind, here’s my take on who/what are the proper recipients of Chick-fil-A protests:

The Chick-fil-A corporate entity headquartered in College Park, Georgia
Senior executives of said corporation
Chairman and CEO S. Truett Cathy
COO Dan Cathy
People who lined up to buy fried chicken sandwiches to protest LGBT individuals and their allies standing up for their own dignity
People who honestly think this is a First Amendment issue in anything that doesn’t directly involve certain mayors

Improper recipients of said protests:

Individual Chick-fil-A employees who haven’t said a word, because trying to take on the drive-thru worker will not solve anything and will make you look like an asshole.

This Week in WTF, August 3, 2012

Posted on August 3, 2012 by wellsdc

Russia_stamp_no._1030_-_2012_Summer_Olympics_bid – Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron disses presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”

– So does London Mayor Boris Johnson.

– Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) likens the Obamacare contraception mandate to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. No really, this happened.

– A former Chick-fil-A employee is suing the company because of reasons:

Former Chick-fil-A employee Brenda Honeycutt is suing the company for gender discrimination, alleging that owner and operator of Duluth, Georgia’s Chick-fil-As, Jeff Howard, fired her so that she could be a “stay home mother” despite her “satisfactory-to-above-satisfactory employment history with the company.

“During the Plaintiff’s employment, Defendant Howard routinely made comments to the Plaintiff suggesting that as a mother she should stay home with her children,” the lawsuit states.

– A church in Mississippi, one of the states composing our allegedly post-racial nation, refused to marry a couple because they are black:

A black couple in Crystal Springs, Mississippi says that a predominantly white Baptist church refused to let them get married because of their race.

Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson told WLBT that the day before they were to be married, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs informed them the ceremony would have to be moved due to the reaction of some white church members — even though the couple had attended the church regularly.

“The church congregation had decided no black could be married at that church, and that if [the pastor] went on to marry her, then they would vote him out the church,” Charles Wilson explained.

We have to respect the delicate feelings of “some white church members,” amirite? I can’t wait to hear if there’s a non-discriminatory explanation.

– A small airplane towing a banner with a marriage proposal crashed in Rhode Island, after the pilot had to ditch. The pilot was found uninjured, after his apparently genius 8 year-old son helped the Coast Guard locate him. No word on whether the intended recipient of the proposal said yes.

– A puppeteer on a Christian-themed children’s show in Florida is arrested for conspiracy to kidnap children and, uh, other stuff. It sounds like police have evidence of some pretty heinous stuff, but it is not clear exactly what he actually did regarding the kidnapping conspiracy charge, versus what he just talked about doing. Technically, “extensive Internet chats about eating children” are not illegal in and of themselves without taking a furher step……you know, I don’t really want to talk about this.

– Some Breitbartian named John Nolte thinks that a new Skittles ad promotes bestiality or something. In other words don’t chase your Chick-fil-A sandwich with Skittles. Or Oreos. I’ll have to get back to you on which candies and cookies have the Almighty’s stamp of approval.

Photo credit: ‘Russia stamp no. 1030 – 2012 Summer Olympics bid’ by Russian Post/Beltyukov V., painter [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Chick-Fil-A: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the WTF? – UPDATED x 2

Posted on July 27, 2012 by wellsdc

This is what everyone is so worked up about never eating again.

The Good: The Muppets (well, the Jim Henson Company), sever their ties to Chick-Fil-A.

The Bad: The mayor of Boston tells Chick-Fil-A to take a hike. So does the mayor of Chicago. As much as I may wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, this is not a good idea. Near as I can tell, Chick-Fil-A has not done anything illegal, per se. It would be one thing if the company could not meet some municipal requirements for fairness in hiring, or something similar, but this appears to be a rejection by city officials, in at least two major cities, based solely on the content of Chick-Fil-A’s speech. This has First Amendment problems written all over it, because as long as Chick-Fil-A isn’t breaking the law, it can say whatever dumb crap it wants. We, as consumers, exercise our free speech by criticizing the company, and we exercise our economic rights by eating nasty fried chicken sandwiches elsewhere. The government ought to stick to enforcing the law. Plus, this action potentially sets a dangerous precedent, giving free reign to a far less tolerant mayor of some other city to deny a corporation that supports same-sex equality. (NOTE: The mayor of Boston has withdrawn his threat to bar the company from setting up shop in town.)

The Ugly: Chick-Fil-A recalls its Muppet-themed toys, citing “safety” concerns. Specifically, it claims that, although “there have not been any cases in which a child has actually been injured, however there have been some reports of children getting their fingers stuck in the holes of the puppets.” People all over the world try not to giggle, and very few believe that this announcement is unrelated to contemporary events. (NOTE: If there haven’t been any actual safety concerns, someone could get in quite a bit of trouble for saying that there are.)

The WTF? Someone pretends to be a teenage girl on Facebook in order to lamely defend Chick-Fil-A. Nothing directly links several fake Facebook pages to Chick-Fil-A, so it is likely to be some rogue ally whose help Chick-Fil-A is better of without. The girl’s account promptly disappears from Facebook once “she” is called out. Wil Wheaton helpfully puts out this missing person report:

The entire world of social media shudders in dismay. Names like Abby Farle and Cordell Bunton may go down in obscure social media history.

Honorable Mention: Rick “Frothy” Santorum joins Mike “The Huck” Huckabee (he needs a better nickname) in standing up for Chick-Fil-A. So Chick-Fil-A traded the Muppets for these two? Ouch.

UPDATE: Based on my “dangerous precedent” argument above regarding the cities of Boston and Chicago, astute reader Kathleen points out that the precedent, in a sense, was already set nearly two decades ago, right in my own backyard. The commissioners of Williamson County, Texas decided not to give tax breaks to Apple because of Apple’s policy on benefits for same-sex partners. As the AP reported on December 1, 1993:

Commissioners of a Texas county on Tuesday refused to give a tax break to Apple Computer Inc., citing the company’s policy of granting the same health benefits to partners of gay and lesbian employees that it does to heterosexual spouses.

Apple had sought $750,000 in tax abatements over seven years to build an $80-million, 700-employee complex in Williamson County, just north of Austin.

County commissioners rejected the tax abatements, 3-2.

“We’re very disappointed at this time,” Apple spokeswoman Lisa Byrne said. “We’re going to regroup and review our operations. It is unlikely we will locate in Williamson County.”

Debate on the tax break for several weeks centered on Apple’s domestic partner policy.

“I cannot in good conscience extend that benefit to them (Apple) because of the conviction I have that same-sex partners is wrong,” Commissioner Greg Boatwright had said earlier.

After the vote, Charlie Culpepper, the mayor of Round Rock, which is the largest town in Williamson County, said he disagreed with the commissioners.

“I don’t agree with the idea of same-sex marriages, but government needs to stay out of business. Families need jobs,” he said.

I note a couple of key difference between Williamson County’s decision and the mayors of Boston and Chicago, but the overall principle seems to be the same.

1. The mayors in Boston and Chicago seemed to be wanting to deny Chick-Fil-A the right to set up shop in their towns entirely. In Williamson County, it was a decision not to give them a tax break. It’s mostly a cosmetic difference, since such an enormous tax break would constitute most of the incentive for a company to locate in a particular place. At any rate, Apple seems to be doing just fine in Austin, thanks.

2. In Boston and Chicago, the decision was motivated by disagreement with statements made by the company’s owner, essentially ratified by the company’s history of donations. This is, first and foremost, disagreement with the content of the company’s speech. With Apple, the Williamson County commissioners did not disagree with any particular statement of the company, but rather its employment practices. My spin would be that the commissioners objected to the fact that Apple didn’t discriminate against its gay and lesbian employees. I’m not sure if this is any more defensible than a disagreement over speech, but it is a distinction worth noting.

UPDATE 2: The ACLU of Illinois seems to agree with me (h/t Consumerist):

Alderman Moreno’s single-handed actions are wrong and dangerous. The ACLU of Illinois strongly supports full recognition and fair treatment for LGBT persons in Chicago and across Illinois. Indeed, our strong support for the LGBT community led us in May to file a lawsuit challenging the state ban in Illinois on the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. At the same time, we oppose using the power and authority of government to retaliate against those who express messages that are controversial or averse to the views of current office holders. In this instance, the Alderman is using his governmental authority to exclude a business from opening its doors simply because the corporate leadership has expressed anti-LGBT views in the public. This use of government authority simply is not permissible under our Constitution.

We also are concerned how this practice might be applied in the future. If the government is permitted to deny entrance into a Chicago community to Chik-Fil-A based on statements about public policy, then government elsewhere will have the power to exclude the expanding number of businesses who support fairness for LGBT people. Over the longer term, such government censorship would undermine the growing success of the LGBT rights movement.

Photo credit: ‘Chick FilA Chicken Sandwich’ by J. Reed (Flickr) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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