Chick-fil-A leadership likely made this move because they changed their opinions, not about the nature of sexuality and marriage, but about their branding strategy for attracting new markets. It’s hard to blame the restaurant chain for wanting people who are unfamiliar with them to associate their brand more with chicken than with their founder’s political opinions.
Chick-fil-A appears to be making a gamble. They think that if they make a show of greater tolerance, their critics will reciprocate and show them some tolerance, too.
Branding as Political Warfare
Drew Ferguson of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) hinted at the depth to which Chick-fil-A must kowtow to the left to be considered tolerable.“If Chick-Fil-A is serious about their pledge to stop holding hands with divisive anti-LGBTQ activists,” he said, “then further transparency is needed regarding their deep ties to organizations like Focus on the Family, which exist purely to harm LGBTQ people and families.”
Chick-fil-A must, that is, accept the branding that the left has given to it, as well as to all other organizations the left considers deplorable. By cutting ties with the Salvation Army, Chick-fil-A has tacitly signaled that it, too, believes that charity to be beyond the pale of toleration.
Nevertheless, it will learn that displays of tolerance won’t be good enough. Chick-fil-A must also adopt the right opinions to be labeled acceptable in liberal polite society.
Abraham Lincoln on Tolerance, Appeasement
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in New York City that is instructive for its perspective on tolerance and appeasement.The central question then was whether Southern slavery was an evil to be tolerated and contained until circumstances allowed for it to be abolished constitutionally or a good institution to be celebrated and extended to the rest of the country.
In that speech, Lincoln insisted that while the Republican Party wouldn’t allow slavery to extend into new states, it would tolerate slavery where it already existed for the time being for the sake of the Union. Slaveholding states, though, didn’t believe that Republican displays of tolerance were genuine.
Lincoln asked of the slaveholders, “What will satisfy them?” Similarly, Chick-fil-A’s marketing team probably asked of its leftist critics, “What will satisfy them?”
Lincoln answered his rhetorical question: “Simply this, we must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success.”
So, Lincoln mused, what must be done to appease the slaveholders? “This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them.”
As the CNN op-ed writer said of Chick-fil-A, “silence hoping to pass as reverence” isn’t good enough. Chick-fil-A must join the left in calling all progressive moral opinions right.
Chick-fil-A ought to be known and judged by its actions: preparing quality food and delivering it with friendly service, all while treating its employees exceptionally well, without regard to anyone’s sexual orientation. Instead, the left has defamed its brand with the damning and false label that, supposedly as with Focus on the Family, Chick-fil-A exists purely to harm LGBTQ people.
This is absurd. It’s also absurd, though, for Chick-fil-A to expect to appease a mob of people and organizations who hate them and think their restaurant chain evil. Chick-fil-A should seek relief in a defamation lawsuit from the federal justice system, not from social justice warriors.