Chick-fil-A at Long Beach Town Center had a drive-through line wrapping around the building and into the parking lot around lunch-time today.
Dan Cathy doesn’t say Chick-fil-A is a Christian business; he feels there is no such thing. But he does say that the megachain restaurant ($4 billion last year and growing) operates on Biblical principles, that the individual restaurants should “take Biblical truth and put skin on it.”
And as everyone who has been near a computer or television during the last week knows, that translates to Chick-fil-A as a company standing against same-sex marriage.
Of course, so does something like half the country, as evinced pretty clearly yesterday by “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” with a reported hundreds of thousands of people coming out to patronize the 1,608 franchises nationwide to show support for Chick-fil-A’s stance against marriage equality.
One of those Chick-fil-A franchises resides right here in Long Beach at the Towne Center, and it, too, enjoyed the fruits of “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” the brainchild of former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in response to protests and boycotts against Chick-fil-A that sprung up nationwide over the last week.
The question for Long Beachers is obvious: Should we support or boycott a company with an explicit stance against the marriage rights of one of our prominent communities?
It’s an easy call for me. Mostly because I rarely eat fast-food and have never set foot in a Chick-fil-A restaurant. And since I would never knowingly patronize a company with a stance against marriage equality, it’s not like I’m going to start eating there now. Does that even count as boycotting? Let’s say that before, I was a non-customer but now I’m a boycotter. Boycott, boycott, siss boom bah! Boycott, boycott, rah rah rah!
That said, I appreciate Cathy’s openness. He and I would see eye to eye on part of the message of Matthew 5:15: “Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.” One’s truth ought to be displayed openly so all may bear witness.
Chick-fil-A franchises are independently owned and operated—which means, of course, that an owner/operator may subscribe to a different truth than Cathy’s, as is apparently the case with Anthony Piccola, who manages New Hampshire’s only Chick-fil-A. Piccola’s franchise has just signed up to be a sponsor of the New Hampshire Pride Fest, which takes place August 11.
“As an independent franchise operator, I am dedicated to supporting our local community in the best ways possible and we give to a wide variety of causes in Nashua,” Piccola told ABC News. “The Chick-fil-A culture and service tradition in our restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect—regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender.”
But what about John Howard, owner/operator Long Beach’s sole Chick-fil-A? I don’t have a clue: Howard did not reply to the Long Beach Post‘s several requests for comment.
In some quarters, the debate over Chick-fil-A’s stance against marriage equality has become a free-speech issue, which is ludicrous. Dan Cathy was perfectly free to say what he said, and those upset by his words are just as free to call for a boycott. This is, in fact, exactly a kind of action-reaction chain the First Amendment protects.
The more open we are with each other, the better able we are to make informed decisions about the businesses we support, the friends we make, the company we keep. So if you see John Howard around town, ask him where he stands. Maybe you’ll like what he has to say. Maybe not. And maybe his personal position doesn’t matter, since money spent in his store benefits the parent company and helps forward Dan Cathy’s family values, for better or for worse.
But keep in mind that money talks. The dollars you spend go toward supporting individuals who vote and corporations that contribute to political groups and candidates. Which leads to laws being made—such as whether persons in love with members of their own gender ever get the chance legally to wed within the United States.