Gay Rights Activists Attempt to Bully Businesses

Earlier this month, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Bisexual (LGBT) activists reacted with predictable outrage to Chick-fil-A President and Chief Operating Officer Dan Cathy’s admission that he believes in traditional marriage. Again, predictably, various organizations including the multimillion-dollar Human Rights Campaign (HRC) organized a boycott of the popular chain of more than 1,600 restaurants. Taking it a step further, Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston wrote the company a letter, pledging to abuse his political power to prevent their company from serving the people of Boston or providing jobs for Bostonians because of the mayor’s bigotry against traditional marriage.

A Chicago alderman issued a similar threat on behalf of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, promising to block the restaurant’s expansion into Logan Square. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee tweeted, “Closest Chick-fil-A to San Francisco is 40 miles away and I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.” Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray delivered the coup de grace Monday.

How can Boston and D.C. mayors justify discriminating against Chick-fil-A when the unemployment rate in both cities is at a record high, especially for low-skilled workers in both cities? Isn’t this ground for a recall petition or even impeachment by the city council?

To gay activists we ask the following questions:

1. Can you name one homosexual who has been denied service at a Chick-fil-A?
2. What in Chick-fil-A’s position is discriminatory?
3. How would a Chick-fil-A employee know if a customer was homosexual or not?

Would a turn-around be okay? Should Coors beer be put out of business if the heterosexual community disagrees with their aggressive promotion of the homosexual rights agenda? Are they discriminatory against heterosexuals? What about Jeff Bezo from Amazon, who is donating several millions of dollars to promote homosexual marriage?

Let’s stop and think about this for one moment. In recent months, companies like Starbucks, Nabisco, General Mills, Nike and Amazon have all given millions of dollars specifically to political initiatives to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples. Can you imagine for a moment if a mayor of any city pledged to forbid the building of a new Starbucks because they are undermining traditional marriage? As always with this issue, traditional marriage supporters will have to fight hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate donations to the opposition, while HRC complains that Chick-fil-A donates some chicken nuggets to a youth group picnic.

As a pastor and community leader, what I find even more interesting is what the silly boycott and overt abuse of political power reveals about the priorities of the LGBT “rights” movement. Just days after Cathy’s personal opinions—which are shared by the majority of Americans—became a national crisis for the LGBT community, a report revealed that, “HIV-AIDS is affecting black gay men in the United States on a scale unseen among any other group in the developed world” (Agence France-Presse).

In some American cities, more than 50 percent of the black gay male population is HIV-positive. Black homosexuals are less likely to be diagnosed than their white counterparts, and once diagnosed are much less likely to live very long. As has been well-known for some time, African-Americans make up only 13 percent of the population but account for more than half of new HIV diagnoses. And I can promise you, the last thing black men dying of AIDS care about is whether or not the owner of Chick-fil-A personally approves of same-sex marriage.

The ugly truth is this: LGBT activists are, for the most part, wealthy white elites. They cared about AIDS when gay white men were getting it. Now that whites are relatively safe from the disease, they have moved on. They have a new pet cause: They want to redefine marriage in order to force the rest of America to publicly affirm and celebrate their sexual choices. They want to hijack the moral authority of the civil rights movement to further their own agenda, even when the very people the movement sought to free are dying.

The ridiculously hypocritical call to boycott Chick-fil-A, as well as politicians’ threats to abuse the power of their offices have demonstrated the LGBT activists’ priorities. They don’t just want the “freedom” to do whatever they want. They want to be able to tell private business owners what they are allowed to believe. They relish the opportunity to remind all of us that we must seek their approval or face the wrath of the politicians they have purchased—hook, line and sinker.

HRC and other LGBT activist organizations raise hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Huge corporations pour money into their causes daily. But they want more. They want Chick-fil-A to compromise their beliefs or be denied the right to do business. Meanwhile, black men continue to die, while LGBT activists could not care less.

As a result, I am asking for Christians from the D.C. area to join me for dinner Wednesday at 6:45 p.m. at Chick-fil-A on 13600 Baltimore Ave. in Laurel, Md. We will purchase our sandwiches and return to Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Md., for a Bible study and prayer for the traditional marriage campaign in Maryland and beyond. 

Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr. is the senior pastor of Hope Christian Church, a 3,000-member congregation in the Washington, D.C., area. He is also founder and president of High Impact Leadership Coalition, which exists to protect the moral compass of America and be an agent of healing to our nation by educating and empowering churches, community and political leaders.