Media Outraged Because Christian Company Donated to Christian Organizations
Chick-fil-A is a Christian company. This should hardly be a shock to anyone.
It donates to organizations, like any corporation does. Again, this shouldn’t dumbfound anyone.
But let a charity associated with a Christian corporation donate to Christian organizations and watch everybody lose their minds.
The latest Chick-fil-A controversy involves a report from the liberal outlet ThinkProgress that says the Chick-fil-A Foundation gave $1.8 million to three organizations “with a record of anti-LGBTQ discrimination.”
“The donations — $1,653,416 to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, $6,000 to the Paul Anderson Youth Home, and $150,000 to the Salvation Army — actually represent a slight increase from the previous year,” ThinkProgress reported this week.
“The foundation’s funding comes almost entirely from the corporate treasury and shares leadership with the company,” it said.
So, what are the problems with this?
In the words of ThinkProgress, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes “seeks to spread an anti-LGBTQ message to college athletes and requires a strict ‘sexual purity’ policy for its employees that bars any ‘homosexual acts.'”
You know, like Christian organizations tend to do, given that they act in accordance with biblical standards.
As for the Salvation Army, it has “a long record of opposing legal protections for LGBTQ Americans and at the time of the donations had a written policy of merely complying with local ‘relevant employment laws.’ The organization’s website has since changed to indicate a national policy of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.” OK.
The most controversial may be the Paul Anderson Youth Home, a center for troubled teens that allegedly says same-sex marriage is “rage against Jesus Christ and His values.” Of course, it also received the least money by far, just a fraction of what the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army got.
With the exception of the Paul Anderson Youth Home, an organization which isn’t particularly well-known, most of the Chick-fil-A Foundation’s money went to mainstream Christian organizations. Yet, this was another opportunity for the media to trot out the fact that the company is Christian as well as the fact that Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy once said that we’re “inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.”
After this, the company said it would “leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena.” These donations, at least if one is to judge by the ThinkProgress piece (or other liberal sources that piggy-bagged on the story, like Vox and Refinery29), are evidence that Chick-fil-A is engaging in LGBT-baiting.
Except they’re not. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and Salvation Army are both organizations whose missions have almost nothing to do with LGBT issues. Yet, this is the only part of their views that matters to ThinkProgress, which calls what Chick-fil-A did “anti-equality giving.”
These are Christian organizations that a Christian company is giving their money to. Almost all of their work has nothing to do with LGBT issues. Yet the fact that they follow biblical teaching on LGBT issues is the only thing that matters to ThinkProgress, since apparently religious freedom is “anti-equality.”
So if you don’t celebrate the LGBT community — if your religious beliefs don’t align with the left’s cultural agenda — that means that you hate gay people and that you’re against equality.
Christians are being told they must happily agree with lifestyles that are against scriptural beliefs — except they can’t, if they want to stay true to their beliefs. That doesn’t mean that they hate people, just that they don’t agree with their beliefs.
Nobody ever brings up these issues when it comes to how Christians deal with people who, say, drink too much. The one thing that left seems to care about is their stance on the LGBT community.
If this bothers you, don’t eat at Chick-fil-A. Heaven knows you have enough information to know what the company’s values are. If this is what bothers you, you don’t have to have a single bite of its chicken sandwiches or waffle fries.
The problem is, of course, that people do know this and they still eat there. Apparently, America’s values aren’t the same as those of ThinkProgress, no matter how much it chastises the company for its “anti-equality” stance.
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