Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
...In short, let the market sort it out. Let this guy be destroyed by an angry base of consumers with money, and good consciences, who decide to cross the street and eat at McDonald's, instead of Chick-Fil-A.
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This sounds good, but I fear that it fails to adress the reality of the current situation, in which the religiously motivated lobby is so strong and so dedicated as to have the opposite effect. In actual fact, Chik-Fil-A (I can't believe I accidently called it "Chik-A-Flik" in a previous post!) is likely to benefit from their very public apparent opposition to gay marriage. As many as the boycotters may number, you can be absolutely certain that there will be at least as many patrons who will go out of their way to support this establishment, precisely because of its owner's social views.
We are talking about a Christian sub-culture that builds their own schools, hospitals—
even neighbourhoods— produces their own radio, television, and film. Hell, this is a movement that goes so far as to publish their own one-stop inventory of businesses, so as to protect their members from ever having one of those unnecessary and unpleasant encounters with some one or some establishment that might happen to fall "outside the Kingdom" (
http://www.shepherdsguide.ca/). I happen to live within this sub-culture, and I can readily attest that the insider/outsider construct—while in many respects implicit—is fiercely and consistently operative. I can't tell you how many times a celebrity, a business, or an organization is glowingly identified as "Christian" or "Evangelical" by my peers, as if to suggest that it belongs on a higher plane: Filma produced by "Christian filmmakers" are better
because they self-identify as Christians. Food in "Christian" owned and operated restaurants is better precisely
because they self-identify as Christians. When Justin Bieber publicly proclaimed his own faith, it suddenly became inappropriate in my social circles to criticize his music.
Ideally, we could let the market dictate the fate of openly outspoken bigots, but I fear that in our own religiously fragmented society, the market's true power is usurped by dangerous ideologies.