Friday, July 20, 2012

In the News as Week Ends: Scouts (and Chick-fil-A) Double Down on Discrimination




More news items, these about the recent decision of the Boy Scouts to reaffirm their policy of discrimination against gay Scouts and gay leaders of Scout troops:


At Think Progress, Zack Ford notes that, predictably,  former Arkansas governor Rev. Mike Huckabee fearlessly goes where no one else will go vis-a-vis the recent Boy Scouts of America decision to double down on anti-gay discrimination.  Even though others are thinking that the decision is necessary to protect Boy Scouts from predatory gay pedophiles, among political leaders considered to have national stature only Huckabee has been willing to voice the ugly old discriminatory meme.

Huckabee has adroitly developed an aw shucks nice-guy persona that, for some reason, gulls the mainstream media and many American citizens who haven't watched him at close range as we Arkansans have.  I remain as baffled by people's willingness to believe in that persona as I am baffled by the willingness of the media and many Catholics to imagine His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan as just one of the guys, the sweetest sort of fellow you'd ever hope to share a brew and a brat with at a ballgame.

In contrast to Rev. Huckabee, the New York Times finds the Boy Scout decision a "19th-century" one, and calls on the White House to end its support for the group, and Mitt Romney, who stated in 1994 that the Scouts should be open to all "regardless of sexual orientation," to speak out--though the editorial suggests that neither Obama nor Romney will have the courage to take these steps.

And in the not unrelated controversy that Chick-fil-A has stirred this week when its owner Dan Cathy told Baptist Press that he's "guilty as charged" of supporting anti-gay discrimination: the inimitable Domenick Scudera wonders out loud at Huffington Post about what Cathy's announcement portends for him as a proud fast food-eating American.  Scudera "thank[s] the Lord that I live in a country where fast food is a place of judgment and where chicken sandwiches bring me closer to the Almighty God."

But he's a tad bit confused by Chick-fil-A's insistence that it's serving up a side of good old-fashioned biblically-based Christianity with its mouth-watering chicken sandwiches, since the good old-fashioned bible Mr. Cathy cites talks about good old-fashioned bible-based families that include multiple wives and concubines.  So Scudera muses,

The Chick-fil-A website says that the restaurant is "committed to encouraging families to come together while enjoying great food," so I am not sure which of my families I should bring. My multiple wives or my concubines? 

And he wonders how to deal with those bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits Chick-fil-A serves, when the bible clearly says, in Leviticus 11:7, that we are not to eat the unclean flesh of pigs.  Scudera turns to Cathy for enlightenment, since the Chick-fil-A owner has explicitly stated that providing fast food should be a way of evangelizing fast-food consumers:

Swine is forbidden, but bacon is OK, is that right? Oh, teach me, Mr. Cathy, teach me! Remember: Your fast-food restaurant is my portal to Christ!

And so it goes in this hot, dry summer of our Lord A.D. 2012 in the nation with the soul of a church, where one has to laugh sometimes in order to avoid crying at the sheer mind-numbing stupidity and silliness of some of our leaders and many of our beliefs.  And at the tragic waste of our potential and the gifts we've been given in such abundance.

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