“Chick-fil-A faces vandalism, ‘human rights violation’ complaints for defending marriage”
Almost as soon as I read the
LifeSiteNews headline, I had to double-check the story. I knew about the
vandalism at the Torrance, Calif., unit, but … human rights violation complaints? Are you freakin’ kidding me? I simply could not believe it — no, no,
LSN had to be exaggerating something, or simply reporting one of the many bogus
bits of information that spread like Captain Trips throughout the ‘Net (remember
last year, when Jon Bon Jovi died in that New York hotel room — oh,
waitaminnit, no he didn’t!). Nobody
could possibly be that petty and hysterical!
But no, the Civil Rights
Agenda’s own website confirms the action, reporting sadly that “Chick-fil-A’s
‘intolerant corporate culture’ violates the Illinois Human Rights Act, which
prohibits a ‘public accommodation’ from making protected classes ‘unwelcome,
objectionable or unacceptable.’” To get
to the story, you have to click on a Photoshopped picture of a Chick-fil-A sign
whose marquee proclaims, “YOU & YOUR GAY FAMILY ARE OBJECTIONABLE &
UNACCEPTABLE”; the caption sullenly informs you, “Our lawyers are making us
say: the above graphic is obviously a parody and what we believe LGBTQ folks
see when they look at a Chick-fil-A sign.”
Not only will this story not die a natural death, it doesn’t
appear even to be suffering a summer cold.
Could this be the year the left goes so far over the top that they lose
all credibility even among those they purport to champion?
Of course it’s a frivolous waste of time. The substance of the complaint is that “Chick-fil-A
used to be one of [a gay couple and their daughter’s] favorite places to
eat until Mr. Cathy’s latest statements were reported so widely. Now, they feel completely unwelcome in the
establishment.” [That's directly from the CRA website, and that's all they have on the matter. I promise you, I'm not leaving anything out!] Note that it’s not about
anything anyone at their local restaurant did, as
was the case with Denny’s problems with racial discrimination back in the early
’90s; it was, rather, what Cathy — an American citizen with the full
protection of the Constitution, including
the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and of religion — was reported
to have said.
The IHRC, formed by the Illinois Human Rights Act (775
ILCS 5/1-101 et seq.), exists, according to its own
website, “to adjudicate complaints of civil rights violation in housing,
employment, public accommodations [such as restaurants] and financial credit”. Under 775 ILCS 5/5-102.1, para. (b), which
defines non-violations with respect to public accommodations, “the exercise of
free speech, free expression, free exercise of religion or expression of
religiously based views by any individual or group of individuals that is
protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution or under
Section 3 of Article I, or Section 4 of Article I, of the Illinois
Constitution, shall not be a civil rights violation.”
It’s not enough for Cathy to have said things that the media
and various LGBT activists presented and interpreted as hateful. It would not be enough even had Cathy openly said,
in the manner of the vile
Fred Phelps, “God hates fags.” Now, if
Joe Schmuckatelli, the manager of the Bedrock Chick-fil-A, saw two men holding
hands and tossed them out on their ears while shouting obscenities, then there would be a case under IHRA. And Cathy himself would probably lead the auto-da-fé by personally firing
Schmuckatelli, while most of us in the pro-traditional marriage camp would be
writing the equivalent of facepalms (“Thanks a lot, you jerk!”).
The point is that Cathy, whatever you may think of his
opinion, didn’t surrender his right of free speech or his freedom of religion
by dint of going into business.
Moreover, the law recognizes a distinction between Cathy himself and
Chick-fil-A, which may be the Cathy family business but is not the Cathy family
themselves. And as others have pointed
out, if you can punish a business for the owner being anti-SSM, you can punish
a business for the owner being pro-SSM, or pro-abortion, or pro-whatever else
is on the leftist agenda. Can you
imagine the fireworks that would shoot off if, say, Jacksonville, Fla., tried
to run Starbuck’s out of town for contributing to Planned Barrenhood?
“Yes, but OUR position is good and reasonable; theirs is evil and irrational!” However, the First Amendment isn’t contingent
on opinions being good or rational, especially if your definition of “rational”
is solely “whatever means of reasoning brings the politically correct result”. The point is that under the First Amendment
there is no such thing as “politically incorrect” speech or thought. If you want to throw
out UT sociologist Mark Regnerus’ gay-parenting study as “scientific
malfeasance”, you’d better be prepared to burn Evelyn Hooker’s “The
Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual”, which sociologist and former CCNY
professor Steven Goldberg once compared to “selecting a sample of 30
six-foot-tall women and six-foot-tall men and concluding that women are as tall
as men.”
The idea that the couple suffered a human-rights violation
because the media’s hatchet job on Dan Cathy made them feel unwelcome is much
like a rear-echelon soldier demanding a Purple Heart because he got a paper cut
carrying documents near a war zone. It’s
too out of proportion to the proximate cause; we’re tempted to mockery rather
than sympathy. “Oh, poor widdle baby,
did your feewings get hurt?”
Sexual slavery? That’s
a human rights violation. Human
trafficking, ditto. Ethnic cleansing,
same. Religious and political persecutions
are human rights violations. Having your
dinner spoiled by the loud-mouthed liars and useful idiots of the press? Hell, that’s another day at the office. Cowboy up.
It would be nice if everyone respected everyone else,
everyone told the truth with charity, and public debates were carried out
without everyone demonizing everyone else.
But we’re not entitled to go through our lives without opposition,
without ever feeling unloved or left out.
Sometimes, to paraphrase the Chorus at the end of Oedipus Rex, it’s all we can do to get through our whole lives
unscathed.
Welcome to the human condition. Original sin is a bitch, ain’t it?
