I want my Chick-fil-A

Poor Florida Gulf Coast University. Not only does it have one of the world’s truly unfortunate combinations of initials –– FGCU? Were they paying attention –– but it also finds itself constantly embroiled in the kind of petty disruptions that local newspapers love to cover for the color they provide.

The latest example is the tempest in a teaspoon stirred up by one Rashad Davis, who holds the title of director of multicultural relations for the Student Government Association.
Given the Wonder Bread demographics that characterize the college-attending population of Southwest Florida, we’re sure he’s probably hard-pressed to stay busy. But still . . .
Rashad complains that plans to renovate a food court and bring in Chick-fil-A represents a blow to gay people because of what he calls the company’s support of homophobes. Of course, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

In fact, he’s about about as uninformed as they come.

Chick-fil-A doesn’t “associate with homophobic groups.” The corporation, which is family-owned and known for its devout and largely private attitude toward its faith, agreed to a request to furnish food for a gathering attended by some who are intolerant of gay marriage. That fact was incidental to the company’s decision to serve as a vendor for the gathering, but knee-jerk twits have jumped on it as evidence of some nefarious “campaign” to hound gays. That’s malarkey, but understandable in an age in which self-aggrandizing clowns like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have made the demonization of perverts a line item in their annual fund-raising budgets.

The admirable and uncompromisingly tolerant behavior exhibited by the company’s founder, Truett Cathy, and maintained by his sons, has nothing in common with the public posturing of those who have long profited by preaching intolerance for the sake of greed and wrapping themselves in their own, mercenary facsimile of words no real Christian could ever imagine hearing Jesus utter.

Rashad needs to learn about the Google. He could use it to get to the truth about the issue in question. That would be much easier than engaging in the kind of rigorous academic research we taxpayers might have assumed he was prepared to assume as a college sophomore.
Obviously, we overestimated the quality of the education he is receiving at FGCU. He obviously overestimates, too, not only his importance in the battle to protect the rights of gays, but his command of the facts.

As he so blithely charges up the personal San Juan Hill on which he’s chosen to establish his fame and glory, it would behoove him to remember that tolerance is a two-way street, that actions based on assumptions are invariably unfair, and that latching onto an easily discredited cause is unseemly, whether one is doing so to promote bigotry, or to protest it.