Chick-fil-A has done it again. But with a twist!
In major, groundbreaking, earth-shifting, culture-defining, history-changing news today………..
Chick-fil-A has had a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion page on its website.
Egads!
What seems to have happened here is that someone on Twitter dug up the page (which you can access through two clicks on Chick-fil-A’s homepage) and presented it as a new announcement of a hiring of a vice president of DEI, even though the current guy has been in that role for more than two years. The first full sentences of the offending “announcement” read as follows:
Chick-fil-A’s Corporate Purpose is “To glorify God by being a faithful stewards of all that is entrusted to us. To have a positive influence on all who come into contact with Chick-fil-A.”
Despicable stuff. What are they going to do next: Donate to the Salvation Army again??
Further down, it gets even worse:
Chick-fil-A, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity, equity and inclusion. We make employment decisions on a non-discriminatory basis and remain committed to maintaining work environments free from any form of harassment.
It has been and shall continue to be our policy that we do not discriminate in employment decisions or tolerate any form of harassment based upon sex, race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, pregnancy, age, physical and mental disability, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, military and veteran status and/or any other status, classification, or factor protected by federal, state, or local law.
Good God. That’s what’s required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as ruled by the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County!
The reaction (to a couple tweets, not to anything new Chick-fil-A has done) was swift and decisive. Someone posted a Twitter poll about whether they should boycott and a bunch of bloggers like me rushed to blog about it, because none of us ever thought we’d see the day when Chick-fil-A was viewed by consumers as being *too* supportive of gay people.
If you’ve never before heard of people being mad at Chick-fil-A for anything ideological, thank you for existing. It’s reassuring to be in contact with someone untouched by the boycott industrial movement. If you’re curious, I’m sorry, but the history of these is that Chick-fil-A’s founder, S. Truett Cathy, believed God intended marriage to be between a man and a woman and said so less than a decade after Barack Obama did. In related news around that time, it was discovered that Cathy’s (and Chick-fil-A’s) foundation was donating to, among other things, causes which pushed for marriage to be only between a man and a woman. This mostly happened a while ago, but every now and then, someone would dig up a more recent donation to the Salvation Army or Fellowship of Christian Athletes—two organizations not really involved in marriage lobbying—and call Chick-fil-A “anti-gay” for donating to groups run by like-minded people to Cathy on the subjects of religion and marriage. Whoever dug the donation up would suggest boycotting, more or less on the grounds that the proposed boycotter didn’t like the religion of the people running Chick-fil-A.
That was the history.
This is something new.
Well, it’s kind of the same—someone is profiting off of getting other people riled up—but it’s different.
This new thing, the thing we’re seeing today, is a push against Chick-fil-A for having any sort of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion entity within their company. Is the push coming for the same purported reason behind the recent DEI-banning legislation in states like Texas, that purported reason being the belief that DEI offices cause race-based hiring and force employees into ideological agreement? It’s hard to say. Here are two tweets from the guy seemingly at the root of this (side note—it is very hard to tell which of these people are and aren’t joking):
The Internet, folks.
I’d love to see a political scientist or a sociologist break down what Mr. Mannarino did here, because I think it might just be what American politics have turned into: With one mouth, the political arguer inflames everybody with something provocative and tangentially related to their movement. With the other, they say something that’s a reasonable enough stance in a debate. The arguer courts the people who just want to be angry, and then they give some justification to the people putting any thought into it—sometimes the same people as the first, just having calmed down. This approach is how one of our two main parties tried to function for about five straight years until it really went haywire and the people listening to the first mouth got out of the reach of those listening to the second and tried to tie up members of Congress.
There’s room for debate around the DEI world, just like there’s room for debate around conflicts like those between LGBT rights and freedom of religion for Muslims and Southern Baptists. We’re not going to have those debates. Instead, one guy is going to try to get a bunch of other people to use their economic voice to try to push Chick-fil-A to change a page on its website and maybe the job title of one of its VPs.
And people call my mostly online movement silly.
