BY NEIL STEINBERG [email protected] August 4, 2012 5:48PM
Hundreds of people line up Wednesday at the Chick-fil-A in Orland Park to show their support for the company after the company president say Chick-fil-A backs "the biblical definition of a family." | Joseph P. Meier~Sun-Times Media
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And here I was all ready to tell you about some of the more interesting qual ities of the element aluminum — did you know that certain grasses contain more than 1 percent of the metal, when dry?
But when I returned from my week off, part of which was spent at the surprisingly aluminum-friendly Oberlin College, readers seemed hot and bothered, still, about the Chick-fil-A saga, demanding that I, in my capacity as the “king of left-wing lunacy in the Windy City,” address the matter.
“If any journalist would be expected to, it would be you,” writes Larry Fischer, of Buffalo Grove, echoing a common theme. “I am wondering whether Rahm’s misguided statement that ‘if you’re gonna be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect Chicago values’ means [to him] that the Catholic Church and probably a bunch of other fundamentalist-type churches should not be part of the community, because their position on gay marriage is exactly the same as the Chick-fil-A chairman.”
I smell a trap. But I am nothing if not amenable to reader input, so we’ll save aluminum for Monday.
I take the above to mean, “Hey, if you’re condemning anti-gay bigotry, then you’re condemning us, because we’re bigots too, though in our case it’s OK, because God is cool with our prejudices.”
Hmmm. Set aside Emanuel, for the moment. As to why Chick-fil-A’s corporate homophobia raised hackles, while the biases of churches get shrugged off, well, score one for tradition. We are accustomed to religious types gilding their biases in the glory of the Lord and parading them where secular sorts would fear to tread. If I wrote that — oh, pick a random crazy prejudice — Filipinos shouldn’t be able to marry because they make bad parents — I’d be tarred as a bigot and an idiot, and rightly so. But let a 2,000-year-old religious text claim God doesn’t like gays, and some insist it must be deferred to by all forever.
Consider it an anachronism, then, one of those traditions we hardly even think about. No civil engineer would stick a big limestone water tower smack in the path of Michigan Avenue. Yet there it is. We’re stuck with it, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to build another one in the center of La Salle Street.
Times change. Just as we are now in the thrall of sane traffic design, so the idea that innocent people should be singled out and marginalized for their race, or religion, or sexuality, has fallen on hard times, though some quarters have not yet gotten the memo.
To be frank, in the vast verbiage already expended on this matter — for those reading this in 2053 on ForgottenPunditsOfThePast.com, the boss of a chain of fried chicken stands told a religious publication that the nation will be punished for tolerating gays (the identical message that excites the Westboro Baptist Church) which sparked a ridiculous kerfuffle that saw good Christians lining up to show their support for traditional marriage by eating greasy foods while gay Americans held kiss-ins to denounce a restaurant executive for saying what half the churches in America say every Sunday.
What surprises me is how each of these incidents is treated in a vacuum, as if it were something new, the Chick-fil-A flap now, the Boy Scout brouhaha a few weeks back, and on and on, when they’re all the same dynamic — some hidebound organization reading off an old script, cheered on by like-minded yahoos hot to pretend that if they marginalize gay people strongly enough, why then they’ll just go away and life will be swell. When what is going to go away, every measure of society indicates, is the brand of intolerance that hides behind the smokescreen of faith.
You are allowed, obviously, to believe what you like and express that belief but — and this is the tough-to-grasp-part — other people are also allowed to reject those beliefs, and are free to pity you for being clueless and, in our constant-communication society, free to express their disapproval. (Though I, in my kindly fashion, have true sympathy for religious sorts, who are sincerely shocked when their well-worn in-church Sunday pieties receive blats of public derision on Monday).
So yes, unpolitic of Emanuel to provide the flail that could be so easily grabbed to make the point, “You think gays are victims? Ha! It is we, the infallible Mother Church, who are victimized once again by arrogant mayors making overly broad statements about what kind of intolerance is permitted in 2012!” Chalk it up to enthusiasm.
What people who use faith as a fig leaf for their bigotries fail to realize is this: that we who don’t share their biases, we who believe that our fellow citizens should be allowed to live their lives unmolested by religious zealots, actually feel as strongly about our convictions as they do about theirs, even though we do not pretend to be God’s ventriloquist dummies. Call it faith of a new kind. Though I’m less worked up about mine, because this issue has been settled. If you can look at history’s arc, you know how this ends. That some are so stiff-necked they can’t turn their heads to see, well, that is their trouble, and ours, for now.
storyidforme: 34623682
tmspicid: 12622237
fileheaderid: 5770968
And here I was all ready to tell you about some of the more interesting qual ities of the element aluminum — did you know that certain grasses contain more than 1 percent of the metal, when dry?
But when I returned from my week off, part of which was spent at the surprisingly aluminum-friendly Oberlin College, readers seemed hot and bothered, still, about the Chick-fil-A saga, demanding that I, in my capacity as the “king of left-wing lunacy in the Windy City,” address the matter.
“If any journalist would be expected to, it would be you,” writes Larry Fischer, of Buffalo Grove, echoing a common theme. “I am wondering whether Rahm’s misguided statement that ‘if you’re gonna be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect Chicago values’ means [to him] that the Catholic Church and probably a bunch of other fundamentalist-type churches should not be part of the community, because their position on gay marriage is exactly the same as the Chick-fil-A chairman.”
I smell a trap. But I am nothing if not amenable to reader input, so we’ll save aluminum for Monday.
I take the above to mean, “Hey, if you’re condemning anti-gay bigotry, then you’re condemning us, because we’re bigots too, though in our case it’s OK, because God is cool with our prejudices.”
Hmmm. Set aside Emanuel, for the moment. As to why Chick-fil-A’s corporate homophobia raised hackles, while the biases of churches get shrugged off, well, score one for tradition. We are accustomed to religious types gilding their biases in the glory of the Lord and parading them where secular sorts would fear to tread. If I wrote that — oh, pick a random crazy prejudice — Filipinos shouldn’t be able to marry because they make bad parents — I’d be tarred as a bigot and an idiot, and rightly so. But let a 2,000-year-old religious text claim God doesn’t like gays, and some insist it must be deferred to by all forever.
Consider it an anachronism, then, one of those traditions we hardly even think about. No civil engineer would stick a big limestone water tower smack in the path of Michigan Avenue. Yet there it is. We’re stuck with it, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to build another one in the center of La Salle Street.
Times change. Just as we are now in the thrall of sane traffic design, so the idea that innocent people should be singled out and marginalized for their race, or religion, or sexuality, has fallen on hard times, though some quarters have not yet gotten the memo.
To be frank, in the vast verbiage already expended on this matter — for those reading this in 2053 on ForgottenPunditsOfThePast.com, the boss of a chain of fried chicken stands told a religious publication that the nation will be punished for tolerating gays (the identical message that excites the Westboro Baptist Church) which sparked a ridiculous kerfuffle that saw good Christians lining up to show their support for traditional marriage by eating greasy foods while gay Americans held kiss-ins to denounce a restaurant executive for saying what half the churches in America say every Sunday.
What surprises me is how each of these incidents is treated in a vacuum, as if it were something new, the Chick-fil-A flap now, the Boy Scout brouhaha a few weeks back, and on and on, when they’re all the same dynamic — some hidebound organization reading off an old script, cheered on by like-minded yahoos hot to pretend that if they marginalize gay people strongly enough, why then they’ll just go away and life will be swell. When what is going to go away, every measure of society indicates, is the brand of intolerance that hides behind the smokescreen of faith.
You are allowed, obviously, to believe what you like and express that belief but — and this is the tough-to-grasp-part — other people are also allowed to reject those beliefs, and are free to pity you for being clueless and, in our constant-communication society, free to express their disapproval. (Though I, in my kindly fashion, have true sympathy for religious sorts, who are sincerely shocked when their well-worn in-church Sunday pieties receive blats of public derision on Monday).
So yes, unpolitic of Emanuel to provide the flail that could be so easily grabbed to make the point, “You think gays are victims? Ha! It is we, the infallible Mother Church, who are victimized once again by arrogant mayors making overly broad statements about what kind of intolerance is permitted in 2012!” Chalk it up to enthusiasm.
What people who use faith as a fig leaf for their bigotries fail to realize is this: that we who don’t share their biases, we who believe that our fellow citizens should be allowed to live their lives unmolested by religious zealots, actually feel as strongly about our convictions as they do about theirs, even though we do not pretend to be God’s ventriloquist dummies. Call it faith of a new kind. Though I’m less worked up about mine, because this issue has been settled. If you can look at history’s arc, you know how this ends. That some are so stiff-necked they can’t turn their heads to see, well, that is their trouble, and ours, for now.