me & her

A Good Day for Chick-Fil-A

Congratulations to all who turned out to support bigotry and discrimination on 08/01/12: You had your day and you’ll likely have many more.

The chicken sandwiches and waffle fries were delicious, I’m sure.

Your impassioned defense of free speech won the day but then, this was no Islamic mosque, and it wasn’t JC Penney celebrating a lifestyle that you do not agree with. It wasn’t Jeff Bezos pledging his support for same.

Free speech, but only for the right cause.

Keep in mind, though: Meaningful, inevitable change is nothing if not patient, and you’re going to have fewer and fewer victories as the months and years go by. Not much more than ten years ago Modern Family – a wildly popular TV show prominently featuring a proud, loving, adoptive gay family as part of the new normal – may not have been a multiple Emmy award-winning phenomenon. Five years ago the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell seemed unthinkable.

Yet here we are.

Eventually this hateful wave of institutional bigotry will pass us by. Anti-gay sentiment and discrimination will be to the next generation what passive racism is to this one: An embarrassment that is awkwardly laughed off as a generational failing.

A relic of the past.

The worst of you will die off sooner than the best of you, and I can only hope that the best of you live long enough to remember with shame a time when you weren’t as compassionate and understanding as you eventually grew to be. A time when faith in a supposedly loving God dictated the horrible, dismissive way in which you treated the happiness and dreams of your fellow citizens.

A day that you celebrated all that by eating chicken.