Chick-fil-A's Dan Cathy Wasn't Making A Bird-Brained Business Mistake, He Was Selling More Chicken To Republicans And Evangelicals

Christina Pesoli (of the Huffington Post) is wrong about Chick-fil-A President, Dan Cathy. He didn't make a bird brained, business-killing  comment about gays. He excited his base. He rallied the chicken-eating consumer base Chick-fil-A has always pursued: gay-hating evangelicals and Republicans.

When chicken king, Dan Cathy, became the object of The Left's scorn and derision, every fundamentalist Christian and every conservative Republican in America went to Chick-fil-A and bought chicken, which is exactly what Dan Cathy knew they would do.

Chick-fil-A has long been a darling of The Evangelical Right. Chick-fil-A offers special deals to churches and to chapters of the CBMC. They close on Sunday. Their franchisees are often pillars of their conservative churches. Chick-fil-A doesn't need to sell chicken to progressives and Democrats.

The truth is, this strategy of offending your non-customers to earn even more business from your customers is commonplace. If you watch TV you already know that there is a whole industry of issue advocates who need - yes, that's right, they need and even cultivate - enemies to help them attract contributions from their core constituencies. There's even a saying about "making the right enemies". That's what Dan Cathy did when he uttered what seemed like bigoted and socially tone deaf remarks against gays: he made the right enemies. The more the gays and the lefties complain about what he said, the more his core constituency stands in solidarity with him by buying more of his chicken.

None of the professional issue advocates will admit it but they have a symbiosis with their  ideological opposites. The smart ones cultivate the right enemies and then ask their ideological base for money. A few years ago I even wrote some fiction (loosely-based on a preacher who was once arrested for burning a gay flag at a gay pride parade) to show how it works.

Capitalizing on his new-found fame as a defender of the Christian faith, the gay flag burning preacher goes on Christian talk radio and conservative right wing talk radio and announces that the next time there is a gay pride event in his area he will walk through the crowd with a can of gasoline and that he will flick gasoline on the gay people. After he has flicked gasoline, he announces, he will then flick lit matches into the gasoline-moist crowd. After announcing his intention to assault gay people with gas and lit matches, this preacher then asks supporters to contribute money to his new "ministry". Every gay hater, conservative Christian and conservative Republican within the sound of his voice sends him $10 or $20.

Likewise, gay and lesbian groups use the preacher's promised gas-and-matches assault to ask for contributions from their base of gays and lefties.

Everybody makes money. Both "sides" made the right enemies and were rewarded with contributions.

This is what Dan Cathy did when he made insensitive remarks about gays. He made the right enemies. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Please note that, in the non-fiction and fictional stories above, nobody is being converted, nobody's mind gets changed. That's why churches and other Christian organizations don't do evangelism anymore. Evangelism is not the goal. Everybody is just trying to make the right enemies to keep the contributions rolling in.

And to keep conservatives eating chicken at Chick-fil-A.
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Why Jesus Would Support Same Sex Marriage

Gay marriage was back in the news again this week because former Bush administration solicitor general, Theodore "Ted" Olsen, filed suit in federal court seeking to overturn California's Proposition 8 and re-establish the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Conservative talk show hosts know that few things rile up their listeners like gay marraige so they took to the airwaves this week and asked their callers what they think of gay marriage with predictable results: call after call citing the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality.

If America were a conservative, evangelical theocracy with the Bible as its constitution, Bible verses against homosexuality might be the debate enders these conservative callers want them to be, but America is not a conservative evangelical theocracy. Had the founders wanted America to be a theocracy based on the Bible, all they had to do was adopt the BIble as the constitution of our new nation. The kind of Bible-quoters who find it inconvenient that the founders didn't adopt the Bible as the our nation's constitution are the same ones who find it inconvenient that the "City On A Hill" theocrats who landed at Massachusetts in the early 1600s were long in their graves before our post-Renaissance founders, many of them skeptics or deists, established this nation in the late 1700s. Yes, it's true that Puritans and Anabaptists first came to this land to freely express their religious convictions but it was not Puritans or Anabaptists who founded this nation. This nation was, in fact, founded by the likes of Thomas Jefferson who actually excised from the gospels the parts he didn't believe and published what came to be known as The Jefferson Bible.

When people say I should oppose gay marriage because the Bible condemns homosexuality, I ask them if they think the Jesus of the Bible would be against theft. When they say, yes, of course he would, I tell them that I don't think the Jesus of the Bible would condone theft either and that our government is committing theft anytime it collects taxes from citizens who are denied the freedoms and justice paid for by taxes. I tell them that whatever Jesus may or may not think of same sex marriage, we can all agree that injustices angered Jesus and that they should anger us too.

But there is a way for Bible-quoting evangelicals who think the US should be a Christian theocracy to have their justice and their theocracy, too, though I note with fascination that they never suggest it. If conservatives had the courage of their convictions, they would move to stop taxing gay people, to repay all taxes paid by gay people, revoke the citizenship of gay people and declare gay people to be aliens or visitors who are not entitled to the same freedoms enjoyed by straight people and not subject to the taxation of our great, straight nation.

Former Bush lawyer, Ted Olsen, is right when he says ""It is our position in this case that Proposition 8, as upheld by the California Supreme Court, denies federal constitutional rights under the equal protection and due process clauses of the constitution,. The constitution protects individuals' basic rights that cannot be taken away by a vote. If the people of California had voted to ban interracial marriage, it would have been the responsibility of the courts to say that they cannot do that under the constitution. We believe that denying individuals in this category the right to lasting, loving relationships through marriage is a denial to them, on an impermissible basis, of the rights that the rest of us enjoy…I also personally believe that it is wrong for us to continue to deny rights to individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation."