Sorry. I couldn’t resist the chance to make a bad joke. I tried to work people having beef with the company into the title but it was too cumbersome.
Anyway, if you haven’t heard (and I don’t know how you haven’t, honestly), the folks who own and run Chik-Fil-A are conservative Christians who “support the traditional family,” which I guess means they support polygamous marriages where a patriarch can take two sisters as wives and bear children with not only them but their two slave girls. (See the story of Jacob, later renamed Israel in the Old Testament.) It’s up for debate is all I’m saying.
This caused a little bit of a flap on the intertubes, with various groups calling for a boycott and others (most loudly, Mike Huckabee) calling on people to consume mass quantities of chicken sandwiches on one particular day to show support for said values.
Eliot Spitzer, writing for Slate (and himself a sterling example of traditional family values) argues for a boycott if Chik-Fil-A’s owner’s position offends you. Dave Weigel, also writing for Slate, gets a littlE deeper into the story and concludes that, yes, Dan Cathy was trying to say what protesters say he was trying to say.
Then the Muppets got involved. Chik-Fil-A had a partnership with the Henson Company to provide toys for their kids meals, which the Henson Company decided to terminate, citing Cathy’s statement as a reason. Chik-Fil-A had another story, claiming that the toys were unsafe, saying that some children “had been getting their fingers stuck in the holes of the puppets.” (I can’t be the only one who thought that was a joke at first.)
There’s reason to believe that Chik-Fil-A set up a couple of fake Facebook accounts to counter accusations of discrimination.
And finally, Boston Mayor Menino tells Chik-Fil-A that he’d rather not have their business.
