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From @DuplexFields, in a thread about erasure of right-coded identities:
Huh. I remember hearing that conversation years ago. It probably just said "gay" instead of LGBT, but other than that it was basically identical.
At the time, Chick-fil-A's charitable arm had been in the news for anti-gay activism. The specific complaints I recall were funding conversion therapy and supporting Uganda's rising restriction of gay rights. Some quick Googling suggests these would have been Exodus International and the Family Research Council. There's a pretty unambiguous motte in which
Chick-fil-A donates money to WinShape Foundation
Winshape donates lots of that money to Exodus/FRC
Exodus endorses conversion therapy, including prominent support for Uganda
FRC lobbies (for weaker language, not against?) the US resolution condemning Uganda's bill
Uganda continues to debate assigning the death penalty to homosexuality
Naturally, by the time any of this was hitting the broader news, it was a messy conflation. The bailey, intentional or otherwise, was more akin to
Chick-fil-A donates money to evangelists and conversion therapists
Evangelists run missions in Uganda
Therefore Chick-fil-A evangelists must be running conversion therapy in Uganda
Uganda considered the death penalty for homosexuality
Therefore Chick-fil-A endorses literal genocide
And that was the state of Chick-fil-A criticism in Texas circa 2012.
By 2014, the bill had been amended to life-in-prison, passed, and overturned on procedural grounds. Exodus International had walked back their stance on conversion therapy and then also imploded. The FRC had been targeted by an incompetent gunman who intended to "to kill as many people as I could ... then smear a Chicken-fil-A [sic] sandwich on their face" in protest of Chick-fil-A's donations. This didn't seem to affect their continued domestic lobbying, including hiring rising star Josh Duggar.
It's hard to imagine this drama as anything other than dead and buried. Chick-fil-A hasn't funded these groups for a decade now, sticking to safer investments in summer camps and youth leadership. Unless I've missed some fresh drama, that conversation is a prime example of tribal signaling rather than an object-level stance, a good reason to be frustrated with the state of identity politics.
It's the end result of a cultural game of telephone, fossilized by sheer memetic fitness and alignment with the Current Thing.
I had thought that the drama was dead and zombified rather than buried, but perhaps it really is buried by now, from seeing this news about Chick-fil-A opening in Boston last year, 9 years after Boston's mayor had publicly announced that Chick-fil-A would be kept out of Boston specifically for their perceived anti-gay politics.
Wait, is that legal? Can the mayor of a city just target a specific business on ideological grounds like that?
Probably not
That was 10 years ago (and Chick-Fil-A did indeed open more Chicago locations). Today, due to the American Bar Association's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy, Chick-Fil-A would find that they could not get a lawyer as it would be unethical to represent them.
Oh nonsense. Go show me an actual state bar code of ethics that says it is unethical to represent actual racists, etc. You won't find one. And I guarantee that they have a lawyer in this suit
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