No, the reason he’s suffering is he had an illogical overreaction to people eating chicken sandwiches.
I’m a conservative, but if they weren’t so busy being outraged that I didn’t embrace them with open arms gays would love for all conservatives to be just like me: anti-religious, small government, and pro-business. Basically I’m against the two things that are the worst cancers on American society: religion and excessive government involvement with our lives, and in favor of the heart of American productivity and the consequent massive increase in standard of living over the past 150 years in this country: business, and specifically a capitalist system.
I think all marriages are antiquated bullshit designed to protect property interests, and their continued existence is just from inertia. When we were all farmers it made sense, much less so now. Notably in early history in agrarian societies most people in the small elite class had multiple partners as they weren’t as concerned about locking down their small parcel of dirt for future generations. But you know what, I understand that even though gays are mentally ill (at least in the case of all male gays, a lot of female homosexuals are probably just products of mental irregularities from being victims of sexual assault and such) as long as they are able to live productively in society I don’t know why what government forms we let them fill out matters, and so I deem the entire gay marriage debate to be stupid and a waste of society’s resources.
So if everyone on the right was like me, you’d all be lining up to get yourself into some weird ritualized relationship that mostly had to do with being able to pass down farmland to future generations and thus has no place in modern society, but hey–I’m a small government guy so I have no problem with any of that, you can do whatever you want.
What pisses me off about the Chick-fil-A situation is the outrage. Chick-fil-A gives money to political causes gays don’t like, and people who are on the “Gay rights” bandwagon don’t like. It’s totally illogical to single out just businesses whose CEO is on the news, because I’m sure the number of business who make such donations but you don’t know about it is far larger–but if it makes you feel better go ahead. But don’t act like it matters, do not fucking act like it matters.
I agree with something I heard on marketwatch the other day, basically that for most consumers these debates are way over their heads. To the “gay rights bandwagon” people fighting in that mundane and uninteresting culture war don’t realize that most of society actually doesn’t think about this stuff on a regular basis. In fact, people on the SDMB don’t realize but they are part of a very small microcosm that genuinely cares enough to think about politics very often. Most people have vaguely defined political positions and then maybe half of them vote once in awhile but the rest of America does not care. By and large this entire fiasco won’t seriously change anything, not because lots of people hate fags or lots of people want to see gay marriage, but because most people don’t live their lives day in day out worrying about gay rights or wanting to have debates about gay rights. I also agree with what marketwatch said in its final analysis: this won’t seriously hurt Chick-fil-A but it was a stupid thing to do, as a business any controversy is almost always dumb to get yourself involved in.
The boycott is supremely illogical, because your money is always going to end up supporting causes you hate as long as you’re participating in this economy, cherry picking the ones that really annoy you just make you guys look stupid. So what really annoys me is the people who have made the stupid, illogical decision to boycott this company have to insist that if anyone continues to go to Chick-fil-A it is because they are bigots. I’m sorry, but no, I bet most people will still go to Chick-fil-A because they just don’t care. But what “gay rights activists” fear more than actual homophobia is people that just don’t give a shit about their agenda. I don’t know why people participated in Chick-fil-A appreciation day, but I like to think it was at least partially a reaction to the bullshit claim that you can’t buy a chicken sandwich without being a bigot. I hope that some people who maybe even support SSM proudly lined up to make the statement that you don’t get to define someone as a bigot based on where they buy their fast food.
I also find it supremely hilarious how far leftist freaks on the SDMB come out of the wood work and talk about “living undercover in the South” like they are Jews hiding in Nazi Germany. I’ve lived most of my life in the South and the simple truth is people here by and large don’t think about these issues on a regular basis. Yes, this part of the country has more racists and homophobes per capita than some other parts of the country, but only the far leftists really believe they are sneaking around Nazi Germany like the Frank family.
Let me also clue you in on something, aside from being a mental illness homosexuality is also aberrant behavior that most humans seem to naturally find visually disgusting. While religious rhetoric is used to justify their hatred of you, the truth of the matter is they only desire to use that rhetoric to justify the natural feelings of disgust that humans see at aberrant behavior. Humans are a social species and we naturally dislike aberrant subgroups as they are not conducive to a cohesive society. So instead of railing like a bunch of pussies against the religious right, just rest more comfortably knowing they are just using their religion as rhetoric–they really just hate you because they think you’re gross and disgusting. Note all the stuff that isn’t aberrant behavior in our culture that the bible prohibits, but that religious people never utilize their religion to denounce, it’s because as socially acceptable practices (eating shellfish for example) people raised in this society don’t view it as aberrant or disgusting.