The New York Times’ story in yesterday’s paper about the Southern chicken chain Chick-fil-A leaves much to be desired.
Here’s the headline:
A Chicken Chain’s Corporate Ethos Is Questioned by Gay Rights Advocates
Chick-fil-A is an evangelical Christian company as well-known for being closed on Sundays as it is for its astonishingly good chicken (seriously: I’m no fan of chains, but Chick-fil-A is outstanding). So what has the company done now to get on the wrong side of gay rights?
Nicknamed “Jesus chicken” by jaded secular fans and embraced by Evangelical Christians, Chick-fil-A is among only a handful of large American companies with conservative religion built into its corporate ethos. But recently its ethos has run smack into the gay rights movement. A Pennsylvania outlet’s sponsorship of a February marriage seminar by one of that state’s most outspoken groups against homosexuality lit up gay blogs around the country. Students at some universities have also begun trying to get the chain removed from campuses.
“If you’re eating Chick-fil-A, you’re eating anti-gay,” one headline read. The issue spread into Christian media circles, too.
Hold on a second. A franchisee, independent of the company, gave some chicken sandwiches to an a marriage seminar in Reading, Pennsylvania, and that makes the whole company anti-gay? I don’t think so.
And that headline the Times quotes is from an inaccurate blog post blaming the corporation for what its affiliate did, though the Times doesn’t point that out.
So does Chick-fil-A really support anti-gay-marriage causes? This is as close as we get to that, way down in the 23rd paragraph of a story padded out with five man-on-the-street interviews:
Over the years, the company’s operators, its WinShape Foundation and the Cathy family have given millions of dollars to a variety of causes and programs, including scholarships that require a pledge to follow Christian values, a string of Christian-based foster homes and groups working to defeat same-sex marriage initiatives…On a petition posted on the Web site change.org, it asks the company to stop supporting groups perceived as anti-gay, including Focus on the Family, an international nonprofit organization that teamed up with Chick-fil-A a few years ago to give away CDs of its Bible-based “Adventures in Odyssey” radio show with every kid’s meal.
But the Focus on the Family thing is weak. Analogy time: Does McDonald’s support Glenn Beck with its tie-ins to Rupert Murdoch’s Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian?
The Times is just the latest to give too much credence to the Pennsylvania angle of this story. An editorial in The Advocate, for instance, inaccurately reported that:
Nationwide fast food chain Chick-fil-A has thrown its support behind “The Art of Marriage,” a series of antigay marriage conferences being held next month in south-central Pennsylvania.
Chick-fil-A itself says a franchisee, which is an independent company, committed to give sandwiches to the conference. Again, there’s no evidence that Chick-fil-A itself agreed to sponsor that conference.
Thing is, there’s plenty of evidence that the company or its founders, anyway, have funded anti-gay-marriage activities before. The blog Good As You, which broke the Pennsylvania story, reports that the company’s WinShape Foundation doesn’t allow gay couples at its retreats and “defines marriage from the Biblical standard as being between one man and one woman.
The Times could have used a lot more of that kind of reporting and a lot less man-on-the-street opining.
The problem with this piece is that the controversy itself is the story, allowing the paper to escape having to do the real legwork of sorting out for us just how legitimate the controversy is.
Thanks for that, Ryan.
Jeremy Hooper
Good As You
#1 Posted by Jeremy Hooper, CJR on Mon 31 Jan 2011 at 08:23 PM
There is more than enough in what you reported to justify negative attention to this company...When the owners of a company take its profit and support initiatives to deny civil rights to anyone, that company merits negative attention.
To me this is less about gay-rights and more about the intrusive overreaching of primitive Christianity into civil society, for which there is explicit evidence, in your reporting. Nothing you wrote delegitimizes the "controversy." It does however add some worthwhile perspective.
#2 Posted by Joey Tranchina, CJR on Tue 1 Feb 2011 at 08:23 AM
This sort of educating is getting tiresome, but I would remind Joey Tranchina that all kinds of governments which do not even tolerate, let alone embody, 'primitive Christianity', from communist ones (North Korea, Cuba) to Moslem ones (all of them) to quite multi-cultural ones (i.e., India) do not sanction same-sex marriage. The taboos against same-sex marriage are pre-Christian; the Greeks tolerated relations between older and younger men, but not marriage between them. Again and again, same-sex marriage advocates display innocence as to why there have ever been taboos in societies against anyone marrying anyone else for any reason.
In fact, the idea that same-sex marriage should have the same legitimacy as that of heterosexual marriage has only occurred to the societies of the historically Christian western nations in very recent years. You can vent spleen against unhip and non-urban conservative Christians if that's what makes you feel good and superior, but it won't take you very far as the definitive explanation for traditional sanctions against homosexual behaviors.
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 1 Feb 2011 at 12:31 PM
I'd add that The Times' reporter on this earth-shaking story is herself a gay activists as the head of an assembly of gay journalists. The Times declined to share this information with its readers, many of whom I expect were mystified at the prominence given this burning issue.
The Times' coverage on any political issues concerning race and gender has been unreliable for a long time, and sometimes vicious (i.e., the coverage of Duke-Lacrosse, for which the courageous Messr. Sulzberger and Keller have never had the - I'll say manhood - to apologize), inasmuch it is driven by activists on the left side of these issues.
#4 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 2 Feb 2011 at 12:28 PM