A single Chick-fil-A store congratulated a gay couple, and conservatives lost their damn minds

A harmless Facebook post exposed the emptiness of the conservative culture war

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About a month ago, the Facebook page for a local fast food chain celebrated a newlywed couple: “CONGRATULATIONS TO THE HAPPY COUPLE!… Dougie & Toby recently got married and we are so beyond happy for them!”

Were Dougie & Toby regular customers? Did they know that Chick-fil-A has a notoriously anti-LGBTQ history including a former CEO who said in 2012 that the company supports “the biblical definition of the family unit”? Who knows. But the post went viral because

1. This was a same-sex couple.

2. This was Chick-fil-A, a company with Christian roots so deep that it’s closed on Sundays.

3. This was Utah, one of the least safe states for gay people.

So… yay? Progress?

When I first heard this story, I assumed it was just the result of a random franchise owner—Chick-fil-A franchises are independently owned and operated—who didn’t realize the minefield s/he was stepping into. Because this was immediately seized upon by the right. The conservative Washington Stand (which is published by the Christian hate group Family Research Council) posted an article claiming this harmless post was “controversial” and proof that Chick-fil-A hasn’t “weeded out the LGBT extremism” within its ranks. As if Chick-fil-A was ever even mildly pro-LGBTQ, much less promoting “extremism.”

While most of Chick-fil-A’s chains are run by local operators, the fact that any location felt comfortable posting such a controversial message is further proof that the company hasn’t weeded out the LGBT extremism that sparked so much backlash just a couple of years ago.

…

Unfortunately for conservatives, the duplicity from Chick-fil-A runs deep. As a lot of Americans remember, customers, and especially Christians, were horrified to learn that Truett Cathy’s chicken empire had not only stopped donating to the Salvation Army and Fellowship of Christian Athletes in 2019 after pressure from the far-Left, but that they’d replaced their giving to these charities with organizations like the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)…

It was amusing to watch conservatives flip out because a company founded by a conservative Christian was, at its core, still a business that didn’t want to alienate customers. So, yes, in 2019, the company’s charitable foundation stopped giving money to explicitly anti-LGBTQ groups and promised it would focus its giving to groups working on “education, homelessness and hunger.” (That included Christian organizations, too, to be clear.)

The Christian outrage was so overblown that Mike Huckabee, in 2023, said the company had gone “full bore woke” and that “one of the big regrets of my life was… taking such a public stand for them in 2012.” (An incredible thing to say given that his daughter is Sarah Huckabee Sanders.)

The company has also hired an executive in charge of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, which isn’t surprising since it’s just good business to make sure you’re hiring and maintaining the best people from as broad a segment of the public as possible while appealing to more customers. (Target got rid of that office and got rid of Pride-themed products in response to right-wing insanity and has paid the price for it.)

Hell, there’s a Chick-fil-A franchise in Maine that’s owned and operated by a gay couple.

The Washington Stand urged the company to go back to its narrow-minded, Christian-first, pro-white, anti-diversity ways:

… Chick-fil-A built a business model based almost entirely on faith. And frankly, that means they should be held to a higher standard. Yes, there are local operators with diverse objectives and opinions, but for the sake of the company’s broader character, those individual franchises should be held to a moral code that reflects Chick-fil-A’s stated beliefs. At the very least, the vice president of DEI should be reassigned to support the Cathys’ original mission, and the cancer of diversity, equity, and inclusion should be eradicated from headquarters.

I just want to repeat: This is their response to one (1) franchise congratulating one (1) gay couple on their marriage. Not only are they overreacting to something that’s completely harmless, they’re acting like this is a decapitation when it’s not even a paper cut.

To their credit, Chick-fil-A’s corporate headquarters didn’t seem to care. They weren’t going to add fuel to this right-wing act of arson.

When critics contacted Chick-fil-A’s corporate headquarters to complain, the company declined to disavow the post. Instead, at least one complainant received a response reaffirming Chick-fil-A’s commitment to inclusion. In that statement, the company said it “embraces all people, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity.”

To be fair, that response appeared to be part of a form letter any company would send to random crazies who email them to complain about idiotic things. They didn’t respond to anything specific about the Facebook post.

None of that that mattered to conservative Christians who desperately wanted to make this a new culture war battle. Like one pastor who said “One of the major reasons I ate at [Chick-fil-A] was because of the Christian values they once held. To be honest, there are restaurants that have better chicken.” Another pastor swore that his family would now “head to [Steak 'n Shake] with it’s healthier food & big, beautiful American flag.” (They won’t be missed. And there’s nothing healthy about a company literally named Steak ‘n Shake.) Another conservative commentator whined about how “Chick-fil-A is standing by their DEI commitments. That includes LGBTQ inclusivity. This is not Truett Cathy’s Chick-fil-A.” (Oh no. Not a company trying to win over more customers.) One Bible ministry lamented that the company was “now like everyone else, but closed on Sunday.”

The right-wing Western Journal opened a commentary about this fake controversy by saying “if you’re someone who runs a business, it’s never a good idea to alienate your core constituency.” But that’s the problem: The company’s core constituency is no longer evangelical Christians, if it ever was at all. It’s far larger than that.

It’s also hilarious that the implication here is that conservative Christians will abandon the fast food chain because one (1) franchise said congratulations to a just-married same-sex couple.

If that’s what angers you to the point where you’re changing your dietary habits, congratulations on having no real problems in your life.

Last week, FRC president Tony Perkins, who definitely doesn’t want you seeing this picture of himself in front of a Confederate flag at a meeting of a white supremacist group, appeared on Newsmax to say the company has “really has dug in on this” (they have not), that the “wages of DEI are death, business-wise” (calm down, big fella), while telling viewers to try burgers instead of eating Chick-fil-A.

Chick-fil-A knows damn well Christians aren’t going to stop gorging their faces with chicken just because a single franchise owner dared to not be an asshole to a gay couple, unlike many of the conservative Christians who have commented on that Facebook post with bigotry like “This is not a marriage” and urging the company to “oppose sodomy.“

If anything, Chick-fil-A won’t suffer one bit from this, but maybe there’s hope that this deals a blow to the power on the right to create culture war battles whenever they feel even a bit slighted. Here they are doing everything they can to make people angry, and nothing’s working. That’s because it’s hard to manufacture outrage over an innocuous post congratulating a married couple while no one’s actually being persecuted.

If this is a crisis, then nothing’s a crisis. it shows you how pathetic the right-wing grievance industry has become.

Honestly, this wouldn’t have even generated much attention if Christian extremists hadn’t tried their damnedest to draw attention to it. That’s because the post wasn’t political, radical, or even noteworthy. It was just… nice. Society isn’t about to crumble because one chicken restaurant owner acknowledged that a gay couple exists and was celebrating their union. One thing we’ve learned, though, is that conservative Christian ideology can’t survive without constant reinforcement from powerful people and an ever-growing list of made-up enemies.

It is pretty amazing, though, to see a company that Christians once claimed as a cultural trophy basically acknowledge that it’s not there to validate hate even when it’s built on religion. Chick-fil-A didn’t betray Christians. They stood with two customers and a franchise owner by basically staying the hell out of this.

Meanwhile, the conservative Christian base is shrinking, which means they’ll only get more extreme. They need outrage to be relevant. They act like the sky is falling but the reality is that fewer people are buying what they’re selling. Even at a time when white evangelicals have more power than ever before, they still can’t persuade people to fall in line with their bigotry.

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