Tastes Like Chikin

If you've ever had to keep track of who is supposed to boycott which company, and over what, you'd know it's an exercise in futility. Personally, I've got bigger fish to fry. I want a smartphone that works, I want a coffee bar that serves it the way I want it within walking distance, and no high-toned small-time über-Catholic blogger tells me where I can and cannot shop. Hell, my tax money already goes to support Planned Parenthood and the military-industrial complex. You think they checked with me first, is that it? Should I stop paying taxes now, you big dummy???

It's not much different with the various GLBTQ advocacy groups (formerly GLBT, or gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender, but now adding "questioning" as the latest acceptable acronym, presumedly for people on the fence about the whole thing, or at least until the next memo comes out), who think we should all boycott a relatively small fried-chicken franchise, based mostly in the South, known as Chick-Fil-A, because its owner had the unmitigated gall to think he could say out loud that he believed what most Americans did, and wasn't a big scairdy-pants about it.

There are two problems in how this is handled in the public square. One is the idea that to disagree with someone is the same as hating them. Only someone so ideologically blinded to the detriment of common sense would run with an idea like that, and yet there are so many of them, as to lead one to wonder whether it's something in the water.

The other is the notion that the right to opportunity, to make one's fortune selling an honest product, requires some form of litmus test on the part of some pseudo-intellectual elite. This is not a difficult attitude to cultivate when so many such individuals are given a bully pulpit in the mainstream media -- or a presidential administration.

Even such outspoken gay columnists as Andrew Sullivan beg to disagree with such tyranny.

The point is that we all have to live together even while we passionately disagree. That toleration is the challenge of our time, and it goes both ways ... calling a bunch of good-faith people bigots and leveraging government power against them is, in my mind, no morally different than calling a bunch of people perverts and leveraging government power against them.

Tomorrow, the first of August, is “Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day” at all their convenient locations. You'll probably find yours truly at the one at Ballston Common Mall in Arlington for supper, surrounded by other chicken lovers, and (no doubt) a few of Arlington's finest to make sure everybody behaves.

But some of Andrew Sullivan's compatriots won't behave, at least not yet. This coming Friday, the third of August, is “National Same-Sex Kiss Day” at the same convenient locations -- click on the image to get all the lurid details -- at which time same-sex couples are invited (by someone other than Chick-Fil-A) to engage in passionate love scenes on restaurant property, until honest patrons either become sick enough to lose their dinner, or do what anyone else would do with opposite-sex couples behaving in like manner.

Tell them to get a room!