Chick-fil-A
CEO Dan Cathy
Rahm Emanuel has been many things in life — ballet dancer,
investment banker, congressman, White House chief of staff, now mayor of
Chicago — and he apparently wishes to add another title to his curriculum
vitae: Grand Inquisitor. He has denounced the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A and
endorsed a Chicago alderman’s plan to block construction of a new outlet
because the company’s executives do not share his politics. This is a gross
abuse of power: Imagine if the mayor of Provo, Utah, had tried to punish a
business for supporting same-sex marriage — the Left would demand his
resignation, etc. The powers of government are not to be used for parochial
political ends. Even in Chicago.
It is worth taking a look at
precisely what has given the mayor of the nation’s most corrupt city such cause
for concern. “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical
definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led
business, and we are married to our first wives,” said Chick-fil-A chief
executive officer Dan Cathy in an interview that launched a million angry
tweets. “We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the
Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on
biblical principles.” Mr. Cathy, a purveyor of sweet tea and chicken
sandwiches, has a better understanding of the American constitutional order
than do the city fathers in Chicago and Boston, among other places, who also
have threatened to use their municipal powers to punish Mr. Cathy and his
company for this alleged anti-gay bigotry.
Bigotry should be made of sterner
stuff. Mr. Cathy did not even target homosexuals, and his reference to being
married to “our first wives” indicates that his criticism of the recent decay
of marriage is by no means limited to the question of same-sex marriage. But
even if it were, it would be worth noting that opposition to gay marriage was until the day before yesterday
the official position of President Barack Obama and his administration. It was
certainly the position of the administration while Mr. Emanuel served in it —
not to mention the position of the Clinton administration when Mr. Emanuel
served in it, too. If a Chick-fil-A franchisee is a detestable bigot because
his boss — a private-sector CEO — opposes gay marriage, what does that make Mr.
Emanuel, whose boss opposed gay marriage as president of these United States?
Chick-fil-A’s senior executives say
that they are guided by Christian principle in both their personal and their
professional lives, and the chain’s franchises famously remain closed on
Sundays, but the company also pronounces itself committed to treating people
with “honor, dignity and respect — regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender.” Mr. Cathy’s own
views are considerably more complex than his critics would have us believe: “We
don’t claim to be a Christian business,” he said in the same interview. “Christ
never died for a corporation.”
It is one thing for private citizens
to stage a boycott of a company with associations that annoy them, though the
gay lobby’s hysterical demands for absolute conformity to its agenda in all
aspects of public life is both unseemly and childish. (The gay lobby is also
wrong about the issue of marriage and should be opposed.) As bad as organized
homosexuality’s bullying tactics can be, it is a far more serious thing when
elected officials appropriate the instruments of government to punish those
with whom they disagree. The analogue to the civil-rights movement is a
defective one: Whatever indignities homosexuals have suffered in our history,
they were not held as chattel slaves or systematically excluded from political
and economic life in the way black Americans were, nor is homosexuality
categorically comparable to race. Boston mayor Thomas Menino threatened to
withhold a business license from Chick-fil-A until somebody reminded him that
doing so would constitute an illegal abuse of official power, at which point he
withdrew the threat but confirmed his simmering hostility.
