Huckabee to GQ: Gay Marriage Will End Civilization

i totally thought alfred was joking about 'have a blessed day'

the only chik-fil-a i've ever been to was on my old campus, where the employees were obv just stressed-out students trying to move the line along as fast as possible -- so yeah, never got to hear 'have a blessed day.'

also the only times Chick-Fil-A employees have said stuff like "have a blessed day!" to me were in semi-rural regions where a Wendy's or Burger King employee would have said the same thing.

Yeah, I can think of at least six businesses in my town where I'll hear that at checkout.

Why was Your Black Muslim bakery named that? Apologies if I'm coming off as thick. Seems a bad race PR move if you're also a hitman?

Bey named the business Your Black Muslim Bakery on the personal recommendation of his spiritual guide, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. In 1971, Bey moved the bakery to Oakland.[1] By 1974 it was the "largest Bay Area bakery specializing exclusively in natural food products", with over 6,000 loaves of bread and over 300 cakes per week sold at 150 stores.

Sorry, missed the wiki link. Thanks!

xp Or "Heaven-O!", which actually has a serious pressure group behind it

"serious pressure group"

Geocities lives on

come on guys let's just sit back and laugh at the bigger and bigger PR hole they are digging for themselves

'serious' and 'influential' maybe not in the hemisphere, much less same zip code with that one. xposts

bouncin around my fb feed...
http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/580779_10150964068092869_1460836878_n.jpg

can't believe the mayor is won't allow chick fil-a in Boston JUST because he doesn't like their chicken

xp I meant that they take themselves and a ridiculous idea like that seriously.

I believe he said he personally doesn't like their company. lol @ them pretending he has any legal standing for not allowing them there.

Christians Say Chick-fil-A Under Siege By Militant Gays // FOX News

What a crazy world.

xp yeah how does that work exactly? i think he can block some public subsidies? iirc he was banging heads w/ wal-mart a while back and whatever he did there was effective. but i don't think he can just like push a button and SHUT IT DOWN

But that isn’t cutting the mustard with Menino. He said he plans to fire off a letter to the company’s Atlanta headquarters “telling them my feelings on the matter.”

“If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult — unless they open up their policies,” he warned

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1061147182&srvc=home&position=emailed

there are tons of licensing/zoning/permitting things city officials can do to keep franchises out

a ha

lmao at militant gays, they have taken up arms and have allied with the cows, they are here for your bibles

I gotta say that unless the restaurant is actually discriminating against GLBT folks as customers, or in hiring -- and from what I've seen there's no evidence that it is -- what these city officials are doing is kinda NAGL. Punishing a business for who/what it supports politically is treading on dangerous ground.

I agree. I still won't eat their shitty chicken sandwiches though.

can you expand a little, phil? i think that's interesting but i can't quite find a good analogue for the dangerous ground. i feel like it depends what 'punishing' means; like either action - respecting a company's right to bigotry (or whatever else), or publicly lending your voice to speak against a company - has baggage, but at least the latter has a positive effect, too.

there's something else that i can't quite put my finger on, too, about how automatically separating the opinions of a company from customers' attitudes towards that company is a sad deferral to the stature of corporations, a can't fight city hall thing allowing compartmentalisation that we would be reluctant to accept in other situations. if corporations are people, this one is an asshole, some vocal recognition of that is powerful i think?

? cities do this kind of thing all the time. if they don't like a business, they have the power to run it out of town, it isn't very complicated.

coworker of mine is a city councilmember for a bay area city and was very involved in keeping Walmart out - arguments didn't get much more complicated than their policies are shitty and they will harm local businesses (an argument you could make about any franchise, really) and then you throw up all sorts of onerous processes to make it not worth the franchise's time to try and get a permit and then they give up. until the next election cycle anyway lol.

I was gonna say, the only thing really different here is that the policy in question is so repellent that city officials are willing to pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard

In many circumstaces I've conflated support for gay marriage with not giving a damn about homosexuality. The CEO took a position on probably the socological and moral question of our time -- an abhorrent one. But I would find it more disturbing if we learned that the corporation offers no domestic partnership benefits (I haven't checked).

lol "policy" I meant "position"

if we learned that the corporation offers no domestic partnership benefits (I haven't checked).

would be surprised if company offers benefits of any kind to its wage employees.

^^^

this is a fast-food franchise people

benefits are probably a 25% discount off their shitty food

chick-fil-a actually offers kinda crazy benefits, i know many ppl who chick-fil-a paid for their college for example, fwiw they do walk the walk in terms of being fundie xian beyond hating gays, not being open on the sabbath, etc., until recently i actually used their being much better arguably more progressive employers than their competitors as my get out of jail free card for still giving them business despite the knowledge that any examination into their politics would definitely reveal some sickening shit (boycotted them during the terri schiavo endgame though). tbh i'm still not sure it's not an adequate reason - chick-fil-a's influence is certainly greater there than in whatever soon to be lost cause it throws money at. at the same time though fuck 'em and fuck mike huckabee and fuck rick santorum.

don't know what kind of presence they have in 'blue' states but they are HUEG around here and i suspect all this flap is going to do is increase their profits.

Not that my twitter/facebook feeds are representative samples, but when the gay Oreo thing was posted I noticed a lot of people making fun of people for saying they would never eat Oreos again because now Oreos are gay, but then suddenly! many of those same people will never eat Chick Fil A again.

in the short term definitely - this isn't whole foods coming out as conservative - but in the long term this hurts them, not that the cathys care at all, these fuckers live to leave money on the table for the greater glory of the lawd.

interesting old forbes article: The Cult of Chick-fil-A

Danielle Alderson, 30, a Baltimore operator, says some fellow franchisees find that Chick-fil-A butts into its workers' personal lives a bit much. She says she can't hire a good manager who, say, moonlights at a strip club because it would irk the company. "We are watched very closely by Chick-fil-A," she says. "It's very weird."

Chick-fil-A, the corporate parent, has been sued at least 12 times since 1988 on charges of employment discrimination, according to records in U.S. District Courts. Aziz Latif, a former Chick-fil-A restaurant manager in Houston, sued the company in 2002 after Latif, a Muslim, says he was fired a day after he didn't participate in a group prayer to Jesus Christ at a company training program in 2000. The suit was settled on undisclosed terms.

http://images.forbes.com/media/magazines/forbes/2007/0723/Forbes_0723_p080_f1.jpg

fuck rick santorum.

― balls, Thursday, 26 July 2012 00:49 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

loved this guy rushing to his local branch as soon as he heard it was bigoted the way other people rush to the buffet when there's a meal deal

schlump, I don't know, it's kinda hard for me to articulate, but it's like . . . I'm sure the mayor of Boston could do through the membership roll of the local Christian Businessmen's Association and find 100 locally owned businesses giving money to the exact same outfits Chick-Fil-A is, is he going to have them shut down? I know, I know, slippery slope, but it just smells a bit to me. Like, all the shit you can flex your political muscle about and you're going to do it over a chicken place and its attitudes about gay marriage? I can't even really explain it.

xxp well, see,there, if there's employment discrimination going on then that's a horse of a different color. As it were.

no, thanks for that, that's what i was after. i think the principle's very true - that meaningful across-the-board improvements would trump visible grandstanding - but it's almost impossible to work out what grandstanding is going to be significant, & what quantity of it will need to happen to effect change; the chronologies of legislation and public attitudes are separate but obviously feed into one another. it's like if you looked through the history of important supreme court decisions & considered them in proportion to the actual cases they discussed, which are p often small in scale or not necessarily entirely representative of a certain issue in microcosm. seeing some picture of the muppets respectfully publicly disagreeing w/these guys, & knowing that, at some slight risk, in cost-benefit terms, of overstepping & alienating, government figures are coming out to stand up for what's right feels good to me. & maybe that's it - feels good - but it's something (& something feels like more and more the older i get?, idk). alfred otm, too, re: benefits.

i think i see more & more noble value in doomed, small-scale holdouts. like individuals boycotting places, as a moral act. what i was saying before, about how automatically separating the opinions of a company from customers' attitudes towards that company is a sad deferral to the stature of corporations is about how you're kinda fucked, now, as a consumer - i don't know that we ever were, but it doesn't feel like we are able to directly influence behaviour by granting or refusing our support - you almost might as well go to the place you hate for all the tangible effect it's going to have, your $3 unlikely to tip a balance in McDonalds staying open or WalMart kicking its employees around any less. someone saying no cheers me up, like as a necessary human outlet for disapproval in spite of its futility.

i often have students whose solutions for major world problems amount to "you should all stop shopping at walmart" and it's like, oh you beautiful well-meaning naive young man....

(they usually recommend that you shop at e.g. target instead to which it's hard to respond with a :facepalm:)

hard NOT to respond

i feel you but i think it's easy to go too far the other way. i stopped shopping at tesco, here, a while ago. i just don't go there: i go to sainsbury's: sainsbury's is probably as bad. but it isn't tesco! tesco doesn't get my money. it doesn't notice & it is doing okay without me. but it is a tax evader, & does not even iirc sell tilda thai jasmine rice, so i do without it, even if i just am out & wanna buy cashew nuts & there is nowhere else around. i am hungry out of righteous spite. as soon as you start on the road of the other place is just as bad you keep in check at least the impulse to not support somewhere. you have to pick your battles, & stores are an interesting choice because the idea of forgoing their auto-selective selling point of convenience is going to impinge on other areas of your life (drive further/more time in car/less time at home/children screaming your name/why must father drive across the border for a kitchen sponge). i guess i am reluctant, even though it is wrong, to totally discard the value of the small moral choice that people are making. even if it makes no quantifiable difference, like it's good practice. i know this is stupid, & worse that it facilitates a whole model of feeling good without doing anything, or feeling good without earning it (there are maybe a lot of contemporary models of this - supermarkets that let you 'donate' to a charity w/a token, petition-signing, who knows). but it can't quite be nothing because it's part of your attitude towards the world & it informs other decisions you make. i'm trying not to exclusively justify all these things as MORAL GRAINS OF SAND, ultimately vindicated by their accumulation. or the mayor guy's righteous stand as awesome because it strikes a blow for equality, necessarily. but that's some of it. it's trying at least. vegetarianism is funny because as soon as you get one foot in it you are at the bottom of a ladder, compromised by your leather shoes & egg-glazed bagels & a million other things. but a little something is better than nothing, & people saying fuck chick-fil-a & through a weird domino effect inflicting Time With Dad on Rick Santorum's poor not even hungry children feels worthwhile to me.

i'm not saying its not worth doing but the idea that it is a real solution is a little naive

sure

I like Target's chicken spinach sausages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2m4qDUycQ4