Since Chick-fil-A ownership made the politically incorrect statement regarding support of traditional marriage they’ve been under fire. But there’s a serious problem.
It’s one thing to stop patronizing an establishment because you, as an individual, don’t like their politics. Vote with your dollars. But it is a completely different matter for the Government to step in and approve or deny business permit applications based on agreement with current political correctness.
If you were a business owner, would you dare step out and voice your support for traditional marriage, knowing that the Government will not approve your permit(s) as a result?
As our own Government destroys Freedom through intimidation, half the population cheers because they agree. What could go wrong?
[Added:] The Anchoress has a post relating to the Boy Scouts and Homosexuality over at Patheos that makes the point better than I ever could with my sophomoric squirrel brain (H/T Ace of Spades HQ):
It’s more difficult to extend a hand to someone else and say, “I see you; you see me; we are not bad people, we just disagree.”
That takes grace.
The brilliance of our constitution is that, in explicitely naming a freedom of association, it says no one can become the prisoner of someone else’s insistence. No one needs to be (as Big Gay Al says) “extorted” into thinking “correctly.” If a group chooses to limit its membership, well, the excluded members are still completely free to create their own associations and assemblies. Thus, the founders provided for the nation to find a way for people to be both together as a nation, and apart as individuals; together to one degree, but still “alone” to another.
It’s sort of the right to choose your friends, or — if you prefer — the shared right to discriminate.
If Chik-fil-A fails because of its owners core belief in Traditional Marriage, it should fail because customers eat elsewhere and their sales plummet, not because Government wiped them out. But there’s the rub, yes? What if sales actually go up as more Americans vote with their dollars? And what if Chik-fil-A has a record month?
[Added II:] Maybe it’s just me. But the Government using the tactic of intimidation, of disallowing the opposition the right to register their own opinion via permitting and other bureaucratic processes seems awfully similar to the lawfare tactics employed by Kimberlin, Rauhauser and crew.
I guess that is Rham’s and Bloomberg’s idea of “Social Justice”. If I lived in their cities (and thank God I don’t) I would be tempted to be part of a mob to tar and feather them and run them out of town.
These are the same people who accuse Christians of trying to impose thier standards on everybody else yet fail to see their own hypocrisy and betrayal of our constitutional freedom of (not from) religion. Today it is just a threat of denying a business license but they are on a slippery slope leading to a holocaust.