Corporate America and the Culture War

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all! I already celebrated  Thanksgiving this past weekend; meaning that by the time tomorrow rolls around, I will find myself lucky if any leftovers at all remain in the fridge. 

With Thanksgiving in the rear-view mirror, the Christmas season has officially begun.  In addition to colder temperatures, decorations, Christmas music, and lots of lots of shopping, another tradition associated with the holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ will begin to appear in supermarkets and malls across the country: the Salvation Army Red Kettle.  For more than a century and a half, the England-based Salvation Army has worked to meet the “physical and spiritual needs” of the less fortunate. The charity organization has several pages on its website urging visitors to donate, giving it the ability to “help disaster survivors,” “provide shelter,” “cure hunger,” “overcome poverty,” “combat addiction,” “share God’s love,” “assist the unemployed,” “equip families,” “fight human trafficking,” “serve veterans,” “love the elderly,” “brighten the holidays,” “stop domestic abuse,” and “teach kids.”

Most people in America probably see the Salvation Army as a force for good.  But not the left.  The left has pigeon-holed the organization as “anti-LGBTQ.”  Even after public outcry led the restaurant chain Chick-Fil-A to stop donating to a handful of Christian charities, the third-largest fast-food chain in the world recently decided to stop donating to the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Perhaps in an effort to accomplish the impossible and placate their critics, a section of the Salvation Army’s website explains how the organization has committed to “serve the LGBTQ community.”

For years, Chick-Fil-A has established a reputation as a maverick organization unwilling to conform to the secularism that reigns Supreme in American corporate culture. The company has a refreshingly unique corporate purpose designed “to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us” and “to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with Chick-Fil-A.” Unlike most businesses in the United States of America, Chick-Fil-A closes on Sundays.  According to founder S. Truett Cathy, “I was not so committed to financial success that I was willing to abandon my principles and priorities. One of the most visible examples of this is our decision to close on Sunday. Our decision to close on Sunday was our way of honoring God and of directing our attention to things that mattered more than our business.”

When Chick-Fil-A sought to expand into major cities, the mayors of those cities did their best to prevent the fast food chain from opening up branches in their respective municipalities because of their opposition to CEO Dan Cathy’s support for upholding the traditional definition of marriage.  It never occurs to liberals that opposition to same-sex marriage does not mean hatred of homosexuals.  Chick-Fil-A seemed to understand that, as its webpage once proclaimed “the Chick-Fil-A culture and service tradition in our Restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity, and respect – regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation, or gender.”

Writing for Frontpage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield highlighted how a very logical explanation exists for Chick-Fil-A’s change of heart with regards to the Salvation Army.  The popular chicken joint recently hired Rodney Bullard as “its Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility.” While the words “social responsibility” make the concept sound appealing at first, remember how the left uses language to manipulate public opinion and make their terrible ideas more palatable.  For example, look no further than the phrases “marriage equality” to describe gay marriage and “reproductive rights” to describe abortion.  The same applies to the phrase “social responsibility.” As Greenfield pointed out, “corporate social responsibility is a leftist endeavor to transform corporations into the political arms of radical causes…Unlike charity, corporate social responsibility isn’t about helping people, but ticking off ideological and identity politics boxes like diversity and the environment.” It looks like Chick-Fil-A has become the latest victim of the “long march through the institutions.”

Apparently realizing that ceasing donations to honorable organizations like the Salvation Army would not satisfy the radical left, Chick-Fil-A has also elected to begin donating to organizations that celebrate the secular worldview.  Rather than donate to the Salvation Army, Chick-Fil-A will instead donate to Covenant House International, described by Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver as “a radical LGBTQ activist organization that celebrates homosexuality, transgenderism, and the entire LGBTQ agenda.” For the left, simply rejecting traditional Christianity apparently just doesn’t cut it anymore.  Only when companies openly embrace the SJW agenda will the left decide to leave them alone. 

According to Fox News, Chick-Fil-A’s “history of charity donations have hurt the chain’s international expansion in recent months.” This illustrates a consequence of globalism: as soon as a company goes international, it begins to reflect the views of the international elite as it becomes further removed from its home base that once molded its values.  The Fox News article touched upon Chick-Fil-A’s recent expansion into Canada and the United Kingdom; countries where the SJWs have an even bigger stranglehold on the culture than they do in the United States. Sadly, it looks like Chick-Fil-A becoming a global empire has led to an abandonment of its “principles and priorities” in pursuit of “financial success.”

No one has offered a more astute analysis of Chick-Fil-A’s decision to cave to the left than Ben Shapiro.  As Shapiro pointed out, “the Left will never be satisfied. The Boy Scouts did the same thing and the Left went after the Boy Scouts. Once you give an inch to the Left with regard to your fundamental principles, the Left will never stop.” In other words, give the left an inch and they will take a mile.

While companies have the right to do whatever they want, conservatives, including myself, found it quite refreshing that Chick-Fil-A stood up to the left; which seems more emboldened than ever before now that the judicial branch, as well as state legislatures, have decided to give the left an inch in the form of favorable rulings and laws relating to the issue of “gay rights.”  As SJWs raised holy hell about a pizza parlor in Indiana saying that it would refuse to cater a hypothetical same-sex wedding, Ann Coulter pointed out that “having won the war on gay marriage (by judicial fiat), now some liberal zealots insist on going house-to-house and shooting the survivors.” In other words, liberals have embarked on a crusade to make life as difficult as people who subscribe to the traditional understanding of marriage, gender, and sexuality. Just about four years after the Supreme Court gave the left an “inch” by declaring same-sex marriage a “Constitutional right,” the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives indicated its desire to take a “mile” by passing into law the Equality Act; designed to “penalize Americans who don’t affirm new sexual norms or gender ideology” and “compel speech.” The Heritage Foundation warned that the legislation “would be used as a sword to attack people and force them to adopt new ideologies about human sexuality.”  Fortunately, as long as the Senate remains in Republican control, the Equality Act has no shot at becoming law. 

Should the Equality Act become law, the Salvation Army would likely become the target of the thought police; which will become synonymous with the government when a Democrat becomes President.  Refusal to cave to the SJW agenda has already led Catholic Charities agencies across the country to stop handling adoption services because they did not want to comply with laws from state local governments barring “sexual orientation discrimination.” In order to comply with the aforementioned laws, Catholic Charities would have had to place children with same-sex couples; in violation of not only Catholic Church teaching but also the organization’s mission of ensuring that children “enjoy the advantage of having a mother and a father who are married.” Rather than violate their conscience, Catholic Charities ceased providing “adoption and foster care services to the neediest children,” including “the most difficult placements, including older, abused children and children with special needs.”  The left’s failure to accommodate Catholic Charities indicates that it would have no problem throwing another charitable organization, the Salvation Army, under the bus as well. 

As for Chick-Fil-A, it looks like some of its loyal followers do not appreciate its decision to abandon its support for traditional values.  In response, Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott sent out a tweet saying “I’m headed to Bill Miller’s tonight,” referring to a barbecue chain that I had never heard of until I began writing this blog.  Ultimately, the free market will decide the fate of Chick-Fil-A.  Over the years, Americans have routinely listed the chicken sandwich giant as their favorite chain. Should Chick-Fil-A lose its top spot anytime soon, it can likely point to its decision to cave to the SJW mob as the reason why.

Those yearning for voices of dissent in the wilderness of corporate liberalism should not lose hope completely.  In an interview with Fox Business host Neil Cavuto, Hobby Lobby CEO Steve Green made it clear that “we value family, and one of the things that we tell our co-managers as we kind of get them up to speed is that their family is more important than this business, and they need to be sure to take care of their family first and Hobby Lobby second.” Notably, the interview took place came after Chick-Fil-A’s decision to stop donating to the “anti-LGBTQ” charities; perhaps indicating an effort by Hobby Lobby to differentiate itself from the fast-food chain, which seems to have adopted a new policy of putting its bottom line above its Christian values.  Like Chick-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby closes on Sundays.  As a matter of fact, Hobby Lobby takes adhering to its Christian values so seriously that it refused to provide its employees with birth control because it violates the company’s deeply held beliefs.  When a legal battle emerged, Hobby Lobby took its case all the way to the Supreme Court and won. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that for-profit corporations with deeply held religious beliefs could exempt themselves from Obamacare’s mandate requiring employers who provide health insurance for their employees to pay for certain contraceptives. 

For all those hoping to convince Chick-Fil-A to change its mind, CitizenGo has launched a petition with a very simple message: “Don’t Cave!  Stay true to your values!” As of right now, the petition has accumulated more than 10,000 signatures and hopes to reach a goal of 20,000. Regardless of whether or not Chick-Fil-A changes its mind, individual Americans still have the power to donate to the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.  These organizations should rejoice in the fact that conservatives donate to charities at a higher rate than the liberals that have declared war on them.

This Thanksgiving, I give thanks for all of my readers, all of the friends I made during my internship in the Swamp, my family and friends, and for all those who have stood up for religious liberty and stood by traditional values even as those on the other side of the culture war work to force those with differing views into submission.