Pastor Scott Lively is calling for a boycott of Chick-fil-A.
In 2012, Dan Cathy, the president and COO of the giant Chick-fil-A fast-food retailer, gave an interview in which he said he was “guilty as charged” for being “very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit.” Cathy spent the next year being the golden boy of the religious right, after making even more biblically-based anti-gay comments, like, “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say ‘we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage’ and I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.”
Soon, every religious right wing nut, from Sarah Palin to Mike Huckabee to the National Organization For Marriage was out supporting Dan Cathy and buying as many Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches as they could eat.
Huckabee even created a Chick-fil-A appreciation day that August, because he was “incensed at the vitriolic assaults on the Chick Fil-A company because the CEO, Dan Cathy, made comments recently in which he affirmed his view that the Biblical view of marriage should be upheld.”
(Of course, Cathy isn’t the CEO, but facts never got in Mike Huckabee’s way.)
Recently, Cathy noted that it was a “mistake” to put his personal, biblical beliefs into the public square while speaking in his role as one of the heads of his family’s business, Chick-fil-A.
Today, Pastor Scott Lively writes that Dan Cathy “became a great hero to Bible-believing Christians by refusing to back down when the homo-fascists demanded he retract pro-family statements in 2012.”
In a column titled “Dan Cathy Takes The Mark Of The Beast” at Matt Barber‘s new ultra-conservative religious right tabloid, BarbWire, Lively writes that while that “headline is not true,” (then why print it, Matt?) Cathy “has done something that suggests he might be willing to take [the mark of the beast] if faced with that choice.”
The mark of the beast is often associated with the anti-Christ, or other spiritual anti-Christian beings, and extreme Christianists often associate everything, from barcodes and microchips to business licenses with it.
How quickly the religious right turns on its own. Cathy didn’t say he supports same-sex marriage, nor did he denounce his belief in “traditional marriage.”
All he said was that he understands that “others feel very different” from the way he feels, and added, “I respect their opinion.â€
For that, Scott Lively and Matt Barber’s BarbWire try to suggest Dan Cathy has earned the “mark of the beast,” or whatever — what do you call it when you print a headline that says that, then renounce it in your opening sentence?
Lively, who, as you know is on trial for crimes against humanity in a U.S. federal court for antigay “work” in Uganda, also says in his op-ed today:
Nobody knows better than I do the price that one pays for standing up to the LGBT bullies. They are not only vindictive and relentless, they are also very creative in their methods of harassment. And there is an entire army of them ready to pounce on anyone who crosses them. I am absolutely certain that they tried their best to make Dan Cathy’s life a constant, living hell since 2012.
…
I am convinced that God is using the homosexual issue as a test of believers all over the world.
…I’m not saying that Dan Cathy isn’t saved, but he has certainly failed the stress test, and failed the Bible-believing Christian remnant everywhere, by surrendering to the “gay†bullies. How long before we see Chick Fil A running “gayâ€-friendly commercials as penance for Cathy‘s “homophobia?â€
Lively closes with this:
“In my mind’s eye I used to see the Mark of the Beast as a black dot on the back of the hand. Now it looks more like a Chik Fil A [sic] sandwich. I’ll never buy another one, and I hope you won’t either.”
Religious liberty is becoming bastardized by the religious right.