On Social Change, Chick-Fil-A and Don Cathy

[dcseain]

I posted a thing over on Facebook -- it's public, but you may need an account.

In the threads on that post of a letter from a Philadelphia City Countilmember censuring Don Cathy, a friend of many years said Ok. My turn. Please let it be known that I am in NO WAY homophobic or other such nonsense, but I DO believe that a private company should be allowed to conduct business however it sees fit. This grandstanding is getting ridiculous, IMHO. Again. key word here: Private. Meaning they can do what they please and believe what they please and pass those beliefs onto their employees. If there was a national food chain that professed the opposite of CFA's beliefs, I would not have an issue with it. I don't quite understand the whole outrage thing. Maybe it is just me.

I replied in a series of comments:
Don Cathy, and CFA, have come to represent the old ways in the negative, rather like the Dixiecrats and Massive Resistance during the dying throes of Jim Crow and a bit past the death of Jim Crow (at least til the current round of voter ID laws have revived ol' Jim).

As to the outrage. I've been utterly dumbfounded by the complete acceptance of my European friends and the TOTAL non issue my partner preference is. The outrage stems from needing to fight against people like Cathy and CFA funding hate organizations (according to SPLC -- the Southern Poverty Law Center). The outrage comes from knowing that people like Cathy, NOM, some churches (LDS and Roman Catholic, among others), and organizations/funds/POCs they support looking to recriminalize people like myself, to prevent us from having equal rights, from being able to openly live as we are, just as anyone else.


Frank Kammeny once came and yelled at a bunch of 20-something queer folk, telling us we didn't know what it was like for his generation -- the secrecy, the shame. But, we of GenX DO know. We're old enough to remember how it was, to have watched it changing, but not trusting it, only in the last decade to fully embrace the now that is not the then of our youth. We will NOT tolerate people like Don Cathy working to put things back as they were.

All that said, that was not aimed at you personally, [Redacted], i know you well enough to know that _you_, among others whom i know, are not part of that problem. But, that is where the outrage rises from.

‎(That got me a bit more worked up than i'd realized.)

Big social change is always hard, and in the US, it always seems to flow down the more difficult path, alas.