The Left Jumps the Chicken — Gets Plucked

  By The Kitchen Cabinet’s Joy Overbeck

As Fonzie learned in an iconic Happy Days episode, jumping the shark ends badly. Since then, the phrase is universally used to describe an event of monumental absurdity. The Left jumped the chicken when it tried to demonize a good man who runs Chick-fil-A by Christian principles and who believes in traditional marriage the way God planned it.

The bully mayors of Boston, Chicago and San Francisco who want to shut down the restaurants got symbolically “pecked to death” by tens of thousands of Americans flocking to support company president Dan Cathy’s right to free speech. (I’m almost done with the chicken puns, really.)

The restaurants were overwhelmed with customers, lines winding around the block in TV news reports. On the afternoon of Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, Pastor Rick Warren tweeted that Mr. Cathy had just called him to say that the 1600 restaurants nationwide had set a “world record…with 7 more hours to go in the West.” Do the Chicken Dance!

But although lots of finger-lickin’, chicken-lovin’ was going on, August 1

really should have been called, “Constitution Appreciation Day.” It was a day when Americans said no, you can’t stomp on our freedom of speech and religion and get away with it. You can’t ban our businesses because you don’t like our religious beliefs. Even if you are a powerful, big-city mayor with a scary big-city machine backing you up. It was a day when the free-speech-violating, free-enterprise-suppressing, freedom-of-religion-stifling liberal mob got waffled-fried and feathered.

How great it would be if now they’d stop branding those who disagree with them, homophobes and haters. By the way, was President Obama a homophobe and a hater when he was running for office — in Chicago no less – and holding office, when he said that as a Christian, he couldn’t support gay marriage?  And did he suddenly stop being a homophobe and a hater last

May, when he changed his mind? Just wondering.

The big question is where the Boston mayor and his copycats got this breathtakingly despotic idea that government overseers are entitled to use an anti-religious/pro-politically correct test to decide if a business can do business. That idea starts at the top, as in President Obama’s now infamous “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” speech. Before that revealing sentence, he said, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive.”

He means the American system of government “allows” you to thrive. And of course the roads and bridges. He means the government giveth and the government taketh away. The mayors are just following through on his concept: you have government to thank for its generosity in building those roads and bridges (hey, don’t we pay for them?) and its benevolence in “allowing” you a license to open your restaurant. Or not.

I would hope the mayors drop their plans to wage economic apartheid against Chick-fil-A. That gay marriage supporters now realize you can’t scream “victim” minus any factual discrimination evidence, and then boldly incite discrimination against those who have different views. I seriously hope that hostilities will cease now that the liberals realize that tyrannizing people with whom you disagree is a losing game. But who knows.

Friday, the gay marriage boosters plan a “kiss-in” at Chick-fil-As across the country. Since moms and dads usually bring a lunch bunch of kids, their youngsters will be stunned to see guys putting the lip-lock on their “partners” and women in a passionate clinch with other women.

Such an in-your-face demonstration amounts to pure belligerence and perhaps harassment when children are present. If the gay pride parades are any indication, semi-obscene wardrobe malfunctions may also abound. Propriety and social mores will be given the shaft in favor of outrageous behavior, in a calculated strategy to shock and offend the traditionalist restaurant-goers.

This is no path to détente; instead it’s guaranteed to foment more hostility, and probably even antagonize those leaning towards gay marriage approval. It’s too bad. But if they want to keep playing chicken, so be it. In November they will find out who has the last cackle.

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Joy Overbeck is a journalist and author who also blogs at www.mycoloradoview.com and her quirky God site,  www.godsayshi.org.  Please visit and comment!

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Filed under: Economy, Featured, Highlighted Posts, Inside The KC, Politics by Sonja Eddings Brown, Aug 3, 2012