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Chick-Fil-A: So What’s The Big Deal, It’s Just Some Chicken, Right?

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Dan Cathy, President and COO of Chick-Fil-A, recently was reported as saying in an interview with the Baptist Press that he and Chick-Fil-A are “guilty as charged” when defining family units as one man and one woman. His verbal support of this corporate philosophy validates concerns expressed for well over a year by many LGBT organizations. Chick-Fil-A actively donates and supports organizations working to strip rights away and exclude gays and lesbians from such things as job protection, hospital visitation, inheritance rights, adoption, and marriage.

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Equality Matters released information on Chick-Fil-A’s $2 million in donations in 2010 to anti-gay and anti-gay marriage organizations in the United States. It is important to note that all of the organizations referenced have taken an active role toward the discrimination of gays and lesbians.

The largest donation of over $1 million was reported to have gone to Marriage and Family Foundation (focused on fighting against gay marriage).

READ: Chick-Fil-A Has Spent $5 Million On Groups Trying To Stop Gay Marriage

The organizations referenced mask their intentions as being family-focused and of Christian orientation.  This type of positioning is reminiscent of the arguments used to protect Klu Klux Klan organizations during the 50’s/60’s/70’s. Hate groups used the concept of “preservation of family” and “Christian values” to defend their racist agendas/ambitions. Over time these organizations dehumanized entire classes of people, often leading to violence.

One important point: some of the organizations mentioned also provide a variety of quality services for families and Christian communities. Their mission and intention are not exclusively anti-gay.

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So, why should you consider boycotting?
How can your little action make a difference?
There’s no way to boycott everything that upsets you, right?

WRONG! Every person has a voice. Every voice has the opportunity to be that rock — skipping across the pond causing a series of lasting ripples.

One example: Oreo. Anti-gay organizations and people were calling for boycotts of Oreo/Nabisco because of their LGBT-friendly Oreo posted on Facebook. In a flood of support for Oreo’s inclusive approach, gays, lesbians, and straight allies joined together to avoid a national boycott. Additionally, fan engagement with Oreo exploded!  The Daily Casserole recently ran a story on the impact of these individual voices.

Moving from macro to micro impacts — Each of us should think about the issues we feel strongly about in life.  THOSE are the issues we should try to make a difference with on a daily basis.

To quote Edward Hale,

“I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything; but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”

What happens if you do nothing?
When you do nothing, you collude!  By colluding, you give your implicit support for Click-Fil-A’s actions. Actions that lead to the dehumanization of an entire class of people.

What’s collusion? (see below) 

col·lude

[kuh-lood]

verb (used without object), col·lud·ed, col·lud·ing.
1. to act together through a secret understanding, especially with evil or harmful intent.

2. to conspire in a fraud.

Illustration by Mike Ritter, Courtesy The GA Voice

Pablito Richardson, a social justice advocate based in San Francisco, Californai, has worked to fight inequalities across race, gender, sexual orientation and health for the past 13 years. His work has appeared at The New Civil Rights Movement several times before.

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Right-Wingers’ Latest Chick-fil-A Meltdown Proves They Have ‘Officially Jumped the Shark’: Morning Joe Panel

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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Donny Deutsch mocked conservatives for running the “woke” hysteria into the ground.

Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have screeched about the so-called “woke agenda,” which they warn will undermine American values and put children at risk from all manner of threats, but the “Morning Joe” host said most voters simply don’t care about that manufactured issue.

“Joe Biden, 350 pieces of bipartisan legislation signed, and Ron DeSantis and everybody else is talking ‘woke, woke, woke, woke, woke,'” Scarborough said. “Again, something that I said on this show and I heard a lot about from liberals, even, in 2021. You’re not hearing it, again, in part because there have been some corrections. You have the head of Berkley Law School, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School going, ‘Hold on, hold on, we’re not going to let these woke mobs get in the way of free speech.’ They’re saying it at the most elite law schools in America, so common-sense Americans are going, ‘Okay, there may still be a problem, but they’re working on it,’ and yet these Republicans are all acting like it’s 2019, 2020 and they just keep freaking out. Well, Joe Biden is talking about job training and signing bipartisan bills.”

Conservatives have turned against Chick-fil-A for hiring a vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion — which actually happened over a year ago but largely escaped notice until recently — and Deutsche said that was a nadir for “woke” hysteria.

READ MORE: ‘Cowards’: Soledad O’Brien rips former CNN colleagues for silence as Chris Licht wrecks the network

“The ‘woke’ movement officially jumped the shark,” he said. “Joe, you touched on this earlier with the Chick-fil-A move. Right-wing company, I don’t say that negatively, very family values, closed on Sundays, the head of the — [company chairman] Dan Cathy came out against same-sex marriages. They’re very conservative. Now, all of a sudden — you’re right, very conservative, obviously a great company, and they came under fire they have a DEI initiative, diversity, coming under fire from right-wing groups. That’s the official moment that ‘woke’ officially jumped the shark and put Fonzie on skis in Honolulu.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Image by Hector Alejandro via Flickr and a CC license

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RIGHT WING EXTREMISM

Fox Host Says Democrats Don’t Believe in Heaven So They Play ‘Hard’ to ‘Perfect’ Earth

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Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy blamed the differences between Republicans and Democrats on religious beliefs about Heaven.

On Sunday’s Fox & Friends program, co-host Pete Hegseth argued religion was liberating because people could realize they aren’t perfect. A video clip of the moment was shared on social media.

“It changes the way you look even at politics,” Campos-Duffy agreed. “And sometimes, you know, we look at how hard on the left they play. They really play for keeps. They play in a way that’s very, you know, a lot of times conservatives look at it and go, why don’t we play as hard as them?”

The Fox News host said Democrats were trying to perfect the Earth because they did not believe in Heaven.

“Well, for them, where we live right now, this place, Earth is it,” she opined. “So everything’s on the line here for them. They think, as you said, they can perfect this Earth. Those of us who have faith don’t believe that. And we believe how we act here determines where we go after. And so we had to behave.”

“And so even in politics, we don’t, you know, we act within those moral limits,” Campos-Duffy insisted. “And you know, the ends justify the means is sort of the rules for radicals. That’s not how Christians act.”

Watch the video below from Fox News or at the link.

 

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Extremist Group Targets Florida High School’s Yearbook Over Inclusion of LGBTQ Students Section

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The publication of a Florida high school yearbook that included an LGBTQ section has drawn rebuke from a conservative group, The Orlando Sentinel reports.

Lyman High School’s 256-page yearbook includes two pages that highlight the school’s LGBTQ students and features gender identity terms such as “genderfluid” and “nonbinary.”

The Seminole County Public Schools in response to the criticism is offering to issue refunds or reprint the yearbook without the LGBTQ section that the conservative Seminole County Moms for Liberty claims is offensive.

“They shouldn’t have any sexual definitions in a yearbook,” the group’s chapter chair Jessica Tillmann told The Sentinel.

“This is a yearbook that goes to every student as young as 14.”

The school’s yearbook is stirring controversy for a second straight year after the district in 2022 considered putting stickers over photos of a student walkout protesting the so-called “don’t say gay” law, the report said.

The Sentinel’s Skyler Swisher reports that “An LGBTQ+ section in this year’s yearbook includes a picture of members of the student’s Gay-Straight Alliance, definitions of key LGBTQ+ terms, a passage on the evolution of pronouns and a profile of a student who advocates for the LGBTQ+ community.”

Danielle Pomeranz, the school yearbook’s faculty advisor, isn’t on board with the district’s decision to remove the LGBTQ content.

“They are definitions,” Pomeranz told The Sentinel.

“They are not teaching anything about sex at all. … Nobody is teaching anybody about sex acts. It is ridiculous.”

Pomeranz has since resigned from her position in the district, citing in part the Sunshine State’s political climate and an unsupportive district, the report said.

“We’ve always had the LGBTQ+ spread in there,” she said.

“Our job as journalists and members of the yearbook staff is to provide coverage of the entire school and that includes all of the communities, including the LGBTQ+ community.”

Read the full article here.

Image via Shutterstock

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