(Portions of this post are taken from my response to a post on Facebook regarding this issue…)
The President and CEO of Chick-fil-A, Dan Cathy, had the wack-a-doo notion that he would operate the private company he is charged with leading on the principles in which he believes:
“Well, guilty as charged,” said Cathy when asked about the company’s position. ”We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.” (via Baptist Press)
Dem’s fightin’ words.
His remarks have been characterized as “a very public stance against gay marriage” (quoting George Stephanopoulus of ABC News), and people on both sides are flipping out, of course, because that’s what we do in the good old U.S. of A. We flip out.
Boston doesn’t want those cute little cows earn a living in their historic American city. Chicago is planning to block the fast-food giant as well. People nationwide are organizing both protests and support efforts with equally religious fervor. Pundits are analyzing the political ramifications of waffle fries. The gay and lesbian community and the evangelical community are both now having to wrestle with the moral and spiritual ramifications of their fast food purchases (although, not with regard to the gluttony issue, oddly enough.) and Chick-fil-A’s coffers are filling up faster than the offering plates at an Elmer Gantry tent meeting.
At Chick-fil-A or Burger King, depending on your political ideology….
My Facebook wall is littered with news articles written to enrage conservatives (complete with a handy form so I can donate some bank to help “expose media bias”-like it’s in hiding or something), pithy preachy pictures demanding I “take a stand for traditional marriage” by jumping up and down like a nut on yet another bandwagon. Some people are advocating secession and drawing up maps hacking the country up into several bleeding chunks, sort of like Solomon threatened to do with that kid in the Old Testament, because they feel our country is so hopelessly divided in its ideology and its moral fiber. Some of them are actually serious.
Friends, our young country has reached its teenage years, and we’re experiencing the angst and growing pains of a young man who grows six inches and four shoe sizes in one summer’s time, and for the life of him, he just can’t work his growing limbs like he used to.
We are a nation founded on individual liberty, and there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 million individuals in this country, all of whom have the right to form and express an opinion on this issue and any other. All of that freedom of expression is never ever going to mesh, and the larger our country grows, the further apart opposing ideologies are going to find themselves. We must focus on our foundation, the precious truth that
…all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
One of the beauties of our American system is that local governments act independently of the federal government, and we as free citizens can move across state lines at our whim. It is worth noting that it is the mayoral offices of the cities of Boston and Chicago that are taking issue with Mr. Cathy’s remarks to the extent that they are attempting to prevent the company from opening stores in their towns. The fact that we can have this discussion at all is evidence that we *can* and *do* have the free speech in this country that we all value. Both Mr. Cathy’s remarks, and every subsequent comment and reaction in this country has been the voice of a free American. A “free” society, by definition, will rarely be a society that totally agrees on anything.
We would do well to look back at colonial American governments, because many people are advocating passing moral laws (in this case, even a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage according to the biblical definition) based on a religious belief system. That is a super-highway to religious discrimination, and that road ends at theocracy. Nearly all of the original colonies were governed this way. In colonial Massachusetts, of all places, Catholics were not allowed to hold public office unless they renounced the Pope. Jews, Baptists, Quakers and Lutherans were all persecuted terribly for their religious convictions, as were people with no faith at all. Massachusetts and South Carolina both actually had state churches. Cramming traditional marriage down the throats of some Americans while denying the right to serve waffle fries and chicken sandwiches to others who might want them is not the way to show the love of God or constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression. It is our duty as Americans to keep religious beliefs separate from issues of the state, and to afford each person the grace to believe and live according to the dictates of their own conscience.
We are bigger than the contents of this box.
Preserving that ideal, and holding onto this country, a place strong enough to protect not only Iraq and Israel, but any and every nation it chooses, a place that the issues of slavery and states rights could not destroy,a place that offers more opportunity, more freedom, and more hope than any other nation on earth because it refuses to be destroyed by the freedoms it so highly values is a nation worth not giving up on just because Mr. Cathy is catching a lot of flack from Rahm Emanuel.
Mr. Cathy has every right to believes as he does, and to run his company based on his beliefs. But, so does Oprah, and so does the president of NBC (as long as his stockholders are cool with it), and so does every American. We do not have to all agree, but we should all be mature enough to understand that the depth of freedom this nation provides is going to create a depth of diversity we are going to have to learn to live with.