Chicken Hearted

As a legal matter marriage  is the creation of a legal entity the members of which receive benefits and incur costs and liabilities they would not have otherwise – similar to the creation of an LLC. (Of course most people who marry see the act as much more - as a  profound declaration of affection and commitment  -  but that is something apart from law and government.)  It seems reasonable and equitable to me that marriages between homosexual couples are given the same treatment and recognition by governments as those between heterosexual couples.

Many religious people disagree. They believe that the institution of marriage is of divine origin, that a marriage must meet some doctrinal requirements  including being between a man and a woman, and  that governments should accept those requirements in deciding what to treat as a marriage. This does not mean that they are bigoted against homosexuals, though some are. It means only that they take their creed seriously as in a free country they have a right to do and as in a civil country they would be able to do without fear of ostracism.

The Chick-fil-A company has been attacked over the years because it and its founder have supported Christian organizations favoring the legality of only traditional marriages.  There have been actions by politicians in some cities to keep the company’s stores out of places in their jurisdiction and at least one serious attempt at a boycott. The boycott failed completely because the company’s loyal customers, many of whom share its founder’s opinions, made a point of patronizing a Chick-fil-A store  at the time.

I do not like to see anyone intimidated by political correctness’s would-be thought police, and I am surely sick of watching gutless corporate weasels cave in and crawl on their bellies out of fear of criticism from a few obnoxious twits on social media.  In the past  and irrespective of whether one agreed with their opinions, it was easy to admire the people running  Chick-fil-A  for sticking to their guns and standing up against the pressure.  Now it is hard not to see them as just another bunch of craven  corporate weasels.

This week executives at the company announced their foundation would no longer give money to the Salvation Army or the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.  I know nothing about the activities of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but the Salvation Army does good charitable work all over the country and is admired for it by many people whether or not they agree with its religious beliefs.  (As an aside I  would guess that the Salvation Army provides more charity to needy homosexuals in a week than the entire LBGT social media mob’s members do in a year.)  There was some stuff from the company about refocusing  the activities of the foundation toward homeless people and other  things, but it seemed fairly obvious that the decision was made and promoted to placate critics. After all it is  odd that a foundation announcing its intention to focus on helping homeless people would simultaneously dump the organization that is doing more than any other to help homeless people.

Besides being wrong, the action is stupid. It won’t appease the company’s enemies. It will only make them more aggressive by showing Chick-fil-A can be had. It will offend and sadden customers and others who had stood by Chick-fil-A.  It is not as bad as what Gillette did. The people running Chick-fil-A are not directly  spitting in their customers’  faces as with  Gillette. They are more spitting in their own faces, and that is bad enough. 

A Slogan

There was plenty of silliness in politics last week.  We had an irrelevant  televised  shouting match between an ill-tempered  woman  or two and one of Trump’s sons  being treated by people in the media as not merely newsworthy, but important.  We had Michael Bloomberg deciding that - since as Manhattan goes, so goes the nation -  he  can be elected president, and a bunch of Manhattan-based lefties in the media seeming to take it seriously.  There were the usual antics from Trump and his enemies in Washington. However my choice for the week’s topper was Elizabeth Warren out there striving singlehandedly to revive people’s belief in the old canard that girls can’t handle math or arithmetic.

There were also things  that, while apparently silly, were actually serious business.  One of these was the way jokes and pictures using the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” slogan (or variations on it) popped up all over the internet and the country.  (Some of the stuff was pretty good. My favorites were a picture of Hillary Clinton holding up a T shirt with the slogan on it and a note explaining that “Kilroy was here” was an earlier generation’s version of “Epstein didn’t kill himself”.)  It is serious because it is more evidence of something our civil masters and their public relations agents in the traditional media should be worried about, and libertarians   pleased by.  More  people are coming to the conclusion that there may be no reason to accept uncritically the official story or version of anything connected to politics, irrespective of how uniformly people in the traditional media push it. This makes people harder to scare and boss around and makes all sorts of logrolling including the game of creating and selling crises much more difficult. I don’t think there is as much skepticism as in the late seventies, but we may be getting there. I hope we do. The skepticism is healthy and well justified.