The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
COLIN MCENROE
Connecting the dots, from ChickfilA to Kanye
Quinnipiac University is having a conversation about ChickfilA.
Early news reports said a campus sorority had invited a ChickfilA truck for a charity event to raise money to help victims of domestic violence.
But it turns out the truck is on campus regularly, and a lot of students like it because — although I have never eaten one — those chicken sandwiches are supposedly scrumptious.
The problem, as you probably know, has to do with ChickfilA’s record on LGBT rights and recently a Quinnipiac professor wrote a scholarly essay ... I’m sorry, a Quinnipiac professor tweeted a rhetorical question about whether the truck and its homophobic baggage should be welcome on campus.
Almost simultaneously, Kanye West released the album “Jesus is King,” which includes the song “Closed on Sunday.” It sings the praises of ChickfilA, which is closed on Sundays for reasons not unrelated to its stance on LGBT rights.
Meanwhile, Mayor Peter Buttigieg, a gay politician who has in the past advocated a nuanced response to ChickfilA, is climbing in poll numbers and fundraising and has a very real chance of being the Democratic nominee, although he faces an unusual uphill climb among black voters.
I will attempt to tie these stories together, even though, as I type those words, it is already starting to feel like a bad idea.
So how should we think about ChickfilA? It starts with Dan Cathy, the company’s CEO. Cathy and his family are conservative Christians. Their reading of the bible causes them to oppose gay marriage and, in 2012, Cathy himself was very public and emphatic about that. By 2014, Cathy (and, possibly, his accountants) had thought matters over and decided it was best to stay out of policy fights. He never apologized for his stance on gay marriage but said neither he nor the company would talk about it anymore.
Meanwhile, franchise owners have, over the years, participated in local gay pride events, so there you go. Also, Buttigieg offered the wry campaign observation, “I don’t approve of their politics, but I kind of approve of their chicken.”
But that’s just part of the story. The Cathy family is led by Dan and his brother, ChickfilA executive veep Bubba Cathy. I mention that mainly because Bubba Cathy is one of the few people whose drag queen name would be his actual name. They are one of the richest families in America and have set up the WinShape Foundation to dole out some of that chicken lucre to nonprofits.
In the past, WinShape gave money to Exodus International, a conversion therapy group, which eventually disbanded when, after 37 years of trying, they finally admitted it probably didn’t work, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.
Supporting conversion therapy is, in my book, kind of a dealbreaker, but WinShape doesn’t do that anymore. Recent reporting has turned up donations to other nonprofits with antigay policies, including the Salvation Army.
OK, here I better come clean. For 16 years, I worked for a radio company with a long record of conducting a massive onair donation drive for the Salvation Army. They are so serious about it that, on the day they told me I was being let go, they subsequently asked me if I would mind manning my onair shift at the Glastonbury Salvation Army dropoff location. You know. If I wasn’t feeling too gloomy about losing my job. And I acquiesced.
But with each passing year, I was growing more uncomfortable with the Salvation Army’s attitudes toward LGBT people. It’s one thing to oppose gay marriage based on one’s reading of scripture. I get that. I don’t agree with it. I’ve spent a lot of time reading scripture and thinking about it and reading other stuff. The Rev. Peter Gomes’s “The Good Book” was a mindopener in the 1990s. I believe Jesus’s teachings are very consistent with total acceptance of LGBT persons.
The question about the Salvation Army over the years has always been: Do they go beyond mere opposition to gay marriage and oppose, you know, gay existence? That was a debatable point as recently as eight years ago, but in 2019 the Army seems to be cleaning up its act. They’ve never apologized for past discrimination, but they’ve gone on record in other important ways.
Anyway, there’s no getting around the incredible work they do for addicts and the homeless. They are literally lifesavers. It is, to quote one of the largest and oldest LGBT publications in the nation, “complicated.”
It will be interesting to see what Kanye West, for whom Jesuspassion is a recent acquisition, has to say now. He was in the vanguard of mainstream stars denouncing hiphop homophobia, and — I just can’t do Kardashianology — I believe he is related by marriage, somehow, to Caitlyn Jenner.
As for Buttigieg, he’s working hard to win over black South Carolina voters, but he’s running into problems, some of which have to do with law enforcement issues, including shootings by police, and others of which have to do with being a gay man.
A 2003 metastudy looked at the longstanding belief that black Americans are more apt to oppose homosexuality than white Americans. The study compiled almost 7,000 black responses and 43,000 white responses to 31 previous surveys and found that it’s — that word again — complicated. Even when you control for differences in education and religion, black Americans are a bit more likely to personally disapprove of homosexuality than are whites. But when it comes to job discrimination and gay civil rights, black public opinion tracks very close to white public opinion.
What’s the takeaway? Think. Learn about the other side. Look at the complexities and ambiguities rather than acting reflexively
Yes, you could buy a chicken sandwich that doesn’t care whom you marry. Burger King’s amusingly trolly Twitter recently tweeted “Open on Sundays,” and Popeye’s is relaunching its chicken sandwich, pointedly, this Sunday.
You could find a shelter to support that isn’t run by the Salvation Army.
You could buy Young M.A.’s “Herstory in the Making” instead of Kanye’s new release.
Quinnipiac could kick the ChickfilA truck off campus and be done with it.
Or we could keep talking to each other. Just don’t expect President Buttigieg to fix everything.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.