Obama Chokes on Chick-Fil-A

I absolutely love Chick-Fil-A.

My original affection for the fast food chain has little to do with the recent controversy centered around the topic of traditional marriage.  We don’t have many of them in my area, so it is a treat when I get to eat there.  The food is always great, and I’m a huge fan of waffle fries..!

Yes, I am a life-long fast food junkie, and since Chick-Fil-A is rarely available to me, it has always been elevated a little higher than the other chains I frequent.

This recent controversy just elevates them higher in my eyes.  They handled the entire situation wonderfully, with grace.  By all accounts (including my own) people who went to support them during the height of all of the drama had a very pleasant experience.  The planned boycott and protests against them fizzled.  Angry activists were greeted with the same warm kindness and service standards set for those who came in support.

Now, according to Scott Rasmussen, 61% of people hold a favorable opinion of Chick-Fil-A.

That’s bad for Barack Obama.

Obama’s former Chief of Staff and current Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel was clearly on the wrong side of this debate when he sought to deny the right of Chick-Fil-A to operate in “his” city.  It’s no stretch at all to see that Obama and Emanuel have very similar ideologies, or to think that Obama would have held the same position in Emanuel’s place.

Now, I am not naive enough to think that all of those people who see Chick-Fil-A in a positive light are opposed to homosexual marriage, but it is likely that most of them are.  Given Obama’s recent flip-flop of his past flip-flop-flippity-flopping on the issue, this does not bode well for him.  Because Obama has changed his position so many times, he loses a good deal of credibility.  Moreover, his switch in position came at a time when the LGBT community was threatening to withhold campaign donations from him; a very crass and cynical political move.  Nevermind that Obama isn’t proposing any actual policy change, or the fact that he was only paying lip-service to the LGBT community.

The real problem for Obama is that same-sex marriage has lost every time the people are allowed to vote on the issue, despite polling that would have indicated otherwise.

The Obama campaign is reading its own polls, and they’re believing them.

If we were to take polling at face value, along with exit polling, we would have had Presidents Al Gore and John Kerry, and there would have been no overwhelming Republican sweep of congress in 2010.  Most pollsters today care less about accuracy and more about propaganda.  The polls are crafted as a means to sway opinion rather than to gauge it.  They stack the deck by over-sampling Democrats, and by polling all registered voters instead of restricting themselves to those who are likely to vote.  Sometimes they don’t even bother to try to keep things that accurate;  they poll anyone, registered to vote, or not.

The fact that Obama “came out” in support of same-sex marriage indicates two things;  he was desperate for campaign cash, and his handlers are buying into their own polling.  That’s dangerous ground upon which to tread.

That so many people approve of Chick-Fil-A in the wake of what the media so desperately hoped would be a giant scandal can only be a bad thing for Obama.

Why Chick-Fil-A is Different

My readers probably already know the basics: 

The Chief Operating Officer of Chick-Fil-A, Dan Cathy, has committed an unforgivable sin in the eyes of liberals and gay activists.  He has dared to disagree with them, without actually being one of them.  You see, apparently it is okay to publicly oppose something on the gay agenda as long as you are one of the people that they adore, like Barack Obama.  No such luck, there, Dan…  You’re a filthy Christian and you must be exposed as the “hate-filled bigot” that you are.  It doesn’t matter that you hold the same position that our illustrious president held a mere few months ago.  You and the business that you operate deserve to be destroyed.

I’ve wanted to write an article about the whole Chick-Fil-A debacle since the episode began.  It’s a very compelling story, and so I was hardly alone.  There have been a lot of news stories and articles on the subject.  The problem with writers, and even lowly bloggers like me, is that we want to feel unique.  We really want to feel as though we are bringing a fresh perspective to a story, even if we really aren’t.  So, I felt bad.  Here was a story about which I had very strong feelings, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to write about it because I had nothing new to bring to the table.

In a moment of weakness (which may have involved a beer or two) I reached out to my Twitter friends and voiced my frustration.  Two of my fellow Twitter conservatives, @JonahCrossing and @SundevilSal, gave me some responses that made me think about the subject a little bit more…

Why does this story bother me so damned much?  We all know that liberals love to boycott and attempt to silence anyone who goes against their ideology.  From #StopRush to Target and many others along the way, the far left always attempts to remove from the public sphere anyone that dares oppose them.  This is nothing new.  It has been happening for generations.

What is different about this that grates on my nerves..?  I didn’t put my finger on that until I asked someone else, even though the answer was always right in my face.  And, though I know that others have brought this up, and I am hardly the first, it does scratch that “journalistic itch” buried somewhere inside me.  Or, maybe I’m just a hack blogger happy to have worked out why this particular episode resonates so much more than any of the similar episodes of the past:

At no time in our history, at least that I can recall, has any politician attempted to deny a company the right to operate a private business based solely on the fact that the owners were Christian.

Liberals boycott businesses all of the time, and even seek to deny them permits to build new locations.  But even the Wal-Mart protests centered around the fact that they were non-union and supposedly mistreated their workers, or that the giant chain would kill the poor mom and pop businesses that we all know liberals couldn’t care less about.  The liberals had a smoke screen, at least!

Now they have dropped all pretense.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston have come out to make statements that they would deny Chick-Fil-A the right to operate their business in those cities.  Apparently, being Christian does not fit the values of Chicago or Boston, which isn’t really surprising, given that both cities are liberal hell-holes that are being destroyed from within by, ironically, the lack of the very Christian values that their mayors decry.  As of this writing, both mayors have had to step back somewhat from their comments, but that changes nothing.  We all know that they only did so because of the spotlight that was placed on them by the rest of the country.  They got hit by a backlash, and rightfully so.  But don’t be fooled…

We can NEVER let this happen, and this notion WILL come into their heads again.  A quote from the movie Serenity comes to mind:  “A year from now, ten, they’ll swing back to the belief…”  Malcolm Reynolds was speaking about the evils of engineering society, and I honestly think that fits here.

And, like the wayward crew of Serenity, we should all “aim to misbehave”.