Do you actually think that even the most eloquent person on Earth could persuade this guy to reverse his thinking? I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to jump to the conclusion that his mind is set in stone. Sure there may be the odd Atheist radio host who ends up becoming Catholic, but there’s a reason such things make the news… they are by far less typical situations than people holding on to some beliefs until the day they die.
I can see the point you’re trying to make, but seeing something as being an exercise in futility saves a lot of headaches. Everyone, or most people, would agree that even Fred Phelps has the right to say what he wants, but few people would be foolhardy enough to waste their time in trying to convince that flock that what they do and say is often morally reprehensible. I’d say that wasting the time and effort needed to reason with an unreasonable person (not saying the CFA guy is completely unreasonable) is worse than jumping to the conclusion that their views will not change. YMMV
I went inside my local CFA exactly once. Between the "How may I serve you, and the feeling that the place was filled with Sunday School teacher wannabes, I was definitely creeped out. It was surreal. I’ve had people be super nice to me in the drive thru at other places, and I didn’t get 1/10th of the creep factor I did at CFA.
FTR the guy taking my order was black, the rest were white kids that make the Flanders kids look like the Gallagher brothers from Oasis.
Yes, they started calling it that a few years ago, even though it isn’t a franchise/franchisee relationship in any sense of the word. The operation, equipment, and property is all owned by Chick-fil-a, as are the rights to the profits. The operator gets a cut of said profits, and is limited in the number of stores he or she can run.
In other words, you aren’t hurting the operator of chick-fil-a as much as you would a traditional frinchise owner.
That being said, I’m probably not going to boycott them at this point.
You’re clearly bringing your own preconceived notions to the table. I’ve known dozens of people who have worked for Chick-fil-A at some point, including a family member. Some were pot heads, some were atheists, some were raised Christian, etc. The only thing they had in common was a decent work ethic.
I did notice that it seemed to be a different business model than most franchises. It looks like they want their franchise owners to be hands on and not just in it as an investment. Part of their business model. Along with hating gays of course.
Like I said earlier I’m not one to boycott for the most part. But the only one I am near regularly is in a food court at one of the nearby malls. And not the one I go to regularly. And half the time I am there on Sunday. So boycott or no boycott amounts to about the same for me.
I have two friends who are lesbian and married. They have two lovely children, both the biological children of one of the women. That woman’s mother is a social conservative who doesn’t “believe in” her daughter’s relationship.
Despite the couple’s best efforts, the other woman cannot gain legal custody of their two children. If the biological mother dies, the bio-mom’s grandmother could legally take the two children and never let the non-bio-mom see them again.
As I say, this isn’t one of those issues where there are two right sides. One side lets this wonderful mother keep her children; the other side doesn’t.
Because he can’t get away with it. He’s holding a position based on a religious viewpoint that has historically led to exactly that level of brutal, tyrannical behavior. Judging from history, if some Christian-fascist regime took over he’d be perfectly fine with homosexuals being imprisoned, or rounded up into camps and tortured to death - because that’s exactly what people with similar opinions have done throughout history.
No. What’s available are deliberately inferior civil unions.
Not me. It means they are probably terrorized by their employer into faking being happy, and quite possibly take out their anger by doing things like spitting into your food when you aren’t looking.
Oh, please. There’s plenty of rabid hatred - much of the push in Uganda for the mass murder of homosexuals is coming from American activists, for example. And there’s plenty of abuse right here; everything from harassment to ambushes & murder. The main reasons there isn’t more is as said because it’s easier for homosexuals to hide.
[QUOTE=Sir T-Cups]
The fact that it’s been 30+ years since we as a society have had violent outbursts towards new ideas, and the fact that the laws are in place to prevent that, has made the desire for violence nonexistent. 'Tis also my opinion that the fact that someone speaks out against gay marriage doesn’t mean they hate the gays, they just don’t want them married.
[/QUOTE]
Nonsense. There’s plenty of violence, and the desire for violence. And yes, people who oppose same sex marriage do so out of hatred; outside of perhaps the rabble-rousing leadership who do so out of ambition, that’s the only reason for opposing it. It’s an example of pure malice; there’s no rational or self interested reason for it, just hatred.
“Act happy or you lose your jobs”. Reminds me of the Safeway worker who was fired because she was in too much pain to smile all the time.
Come to think of it - he does have a bit of a gay smirk to him. We should do the test - boil him in water. If he floats, he’s not gay, and may go on living provided he’s not dead already. If he sinks, he’s gay. We should kill him.
I think he got to his current state of ideas somehow, and that it’s entirely possible to change his views, and anybody who truly believes in their own views and wishes others saw things their way should make this effort before jumping to other alternatives.
Yes, it gives them less resources and power. My good friend is dying of cancer and because she doesn’t have insurance she’s being treated @ MD Anderson’s charity program. She waited months for an MRI when she started having symptoms because she didn’t have any coverage. She can’t be on her partner’s insurance because they can’t get married.
Her partner is her main caregiver but can’t qualify for FMLA to take care of her as her partner dies because they can’t get married. She’s used up all her PTO driving her partner to Houston for treatment.
They are both suffering more than they should have to simply because they can’t get married.
That’s just silly. First, there’s no way that he could listen to thousands or millions of people at once even if he wanted to. Second, he no doubt got his views by being trained in Christian-fundie hatred as a child, and such people are pretty much immune to argument.
And that of course is the point of “civil unions”; the infliction of punishment and cruelty on the “sinful”. The homophobes would prefer to just drag those women out of their home and murder them; failing that, they punish the sinners in other ways.
You mock me, but ask Bricker sometime about my oh-so-effective internet message board debate tactics that persuade people to accept gay marriage. I mean, not to brag, but I think I got one up on you in this regard.
Edit: Also, I can find plenty of places on the Internet to have rational discourse. If you can’t, maybe the problem isn’t with everyone else in the world; maybe the problem is with you, mang.
The food is fantastic. It pains me to boycott them.
On the other hand, the way the employees act make me so uncomfortable that it balances out. Stepford is probably the least loaded way to describe it, but I always think of them as acting too Mormon.
If you have a Bojangles in your area the chicken is better and they have really good biscuits for a fast food place. That being said, this is a fast food restaurant not a coffee shop / art gallery / independent bookstore in Manhattan or San Francisco or some quaint college town. In the real world this publicly stated opinion will probably make Chick-Fil-A more popular amongst its customers (mostly middle class white and black people living in the Southeast), and will not cause them any significant business problems. And of course, even in quaint college towns and really big cities you have diverse populations, large enough that Chick-Fil-A has many more customers who will happily buy their fast food chicken regardless of the CEOs political stances than there are people who will boycott.
Places like Chick-Fil-A aren’t getting the GoVeg.com, vegan smoothie crowd anyway. Let’s say maybe 50% of Americans support gay marriage, maybe only 10% of them (so 5%) at most actually care enough about it for it to affect how they vote (a lot large percentage of anti-gay marriage people would vote based on that, most gay marriage supporters are just passive non-opposers and not vehement advocates.) Maybe only 10% of them (so 0.5% of America) care enough about gay marriage to even bother paying attention to some fast food CEO saying he’s not on board with gay marriage and making donations to right wing socially conservative groups.