Chick-Fil-A Goes Cold Turkey

Some protests against Chick-Fil-A (S)

Well, we’ve done it. A certain Chick-Fil-A was in the news a few months ago when it came to light that some of its donations gone to anti-gay organisations such as Focus on the Family or the National Organisation for Marriage, along with several smaller groups. It has now said that the not-for-profit organisation it funds, WinShape Foundation, is reconsidering the organisations it gives its funds to. 

But why so chicken all of a sudden? Chick-Fil-A has been funding organisations like Focus on the Family and the National Organisation for Marriage for years, and has hardly kept quiet about its opposition to equal rights for LGBT people. In an article that was posted nearer the time, Chelsea explained why, except for those who really don’t pay attention to the world and those in countries outside the US, it really wasn’t surprising to anyone that Chick-Fil-A funded borderline hate groups. Why stop funding now?

Well, the press that they received was largely negative, and the one thing businesses always want to avoid is negative press. And also… Well, that’s about it really. Even the campaign to boycott Chick-Fil-A was enthusiastic but not exactly in the same league as others in history.

At least it was more successful than the right-wingers’ attempts to boycott Starbucks when it came out for marriage equality. Take heart, readers.

But in the aftermath of the sudden awareness of their not quite squeaky clean record, not much changed for a few months. It’s hard to tell if sales went down due to the boycott, increased because of some conservative groups’ attempts to buy more from it, or ultimately didn’t change – either because the two opposing campaigns cancelled each other out or because Americans just don’t care enough either way. Chick-Fil-A’s stock prices aren’t published online (that or they are almost impossible to find – I spent several hours searching, believe me), so it’s still up in the air as to whether they’re suffering because of their views.

But anyway, none of that matters now. They have released a statement saying that their non-profit will reinforce a policy of “Not supporting organizations with political agendas.” The statement continues: “In meetings the company executives clarified that they will no longer give to anti-gay organizations.”

Hurrah, right? We’re doing great. Yay!

Well, maybe not. Plenty of people online and on Twitter have said various things along the lines of “now it doesn’t fund homophobic groups, so I can buy from it again!” I imagine that their stocks are picking up again (that’s assuming that they fell – some sources said the stocks rose after their stance was published), and everything looks all rosy for gay rights.

Take centre stage, well done for being bigoted!
All applaud, please

Except for the fact that the National Organisation for Marriage had donations in excess of $7.4 million in 2009, and Focus on the Family got a slightly extreme $69,780,000 in 2011. Chick-Fil-A donated over $2 million to these and other groups in 2010 alone, which is tiny when compared to FoF’s donations but still a lot of money.

Where does the other funding come from, though? Well they’re notoriously sketchy on the details, if the even mention it at all. Focus on the Family, run by James Dobson, is a media empire designed to promote certain values from the Bible. I’m sure everyone is familiar with exactly which values those are. In their 2011 financial report they outlined their assets and expenses, and $4,908,000 is earmarked as “investments”. Obviously not all of that came from Chick-Fil-A, which only gave $2 million spread among several different organisations.

Do you see my problem here? Chick-Fil-A isn’t even the tip of the iceberg; they’re just a fleck of dust. And obviously if it’s incredibly difficult to keep an eye on companies that donate to FoF, then finding individuals that donate more than a million (and they’re definitely there) is going to be impossible. This fact effectively ruins the argument from many people online (particularly in the comments section of this site) that “if you don’t like a company’s policy, you shouldn’t give it your business.” If we don’t know what organisations fund groups like NOM and FoF, and we can only make hazy guesses at best, then how can we avoid it?

My favourite thing about the comments on that site, by the way, is the fact that most of them are going “ugh, LIBERALS. They could just boycott the company, instead of infringing on the company’s FREEDOM OF SPEECH.” The funny thing is, all we did was boycott. We didn’t hold a gun to their head to change their mind. They got negative publicity because they support organisations that don’t believe abortion should be available to rape victims, or that two people in love are only allowed to get married if they’re a man and a woman, and they decided that they didn’t like that negative publicity.

And I don’t know if it’s because I’m not American and therefore it’s a different concept to me, but in my mind the freedom of speech to say that you don’t like it when a company should fund organisations that promote inequality and remove rights is not going to infringe on other people’s freedom of speech, in the same way (that the commenters on the site forgot) that giving someone equal rights does not remove your own rights.