KU’s Chick-fil-A fans forced into hiding: Contest targets fast food — and conservatives
Having dear friends on both sides of America’s cultural divide is always agonizing, but it’s positively excruciating at times like this, when one side seems to favor a Sherman-march-to-the-sea approach against the other.
Months after decrying Chick-fil-A’s presence on campus, the University of Kansas’ Sexuality and Gender Diversity Faculty and Staff Council now wants that presence depicted — in an art contest inviting students to illustrate “what the presence of Chick-fil-A on campus signifies to them.”
In a protest last August during Chick-fil-A’s move from the basement of KU’s Wescoe Hall to a more prominent location in the student union — and in response to the company’s sponsorship of the football team’s coin toss — the council asked KU to cut ties with Chick-fil-A after current contracts expire.
Now with the art contest — in conjunction with the KU Department of Visual Art, and open until March 19 — it stretches even the most creative imagination to think they’re looking for anything other than continued vilification of the company.
Not because Chick-fil-A has been shown to discriminate against either employees or customers for their sexual identity, but because its founders and owners have supported traditional marriage and Christian organizations.
Nor is it enough that the company surrendered last November, announcing an end to its giving to the Salvation Army and Fellowship of Christian Athletes due to their stances on homosexuality and marriage.
Through a close friend who is gay and married, I feel his heartbreak of knowing there are some who would deny his desire to wed the person he fell in love with. I am not one of them.
At the same time, as the protest last summer and the ongoing art contest prove, advocates for sexuality and gender diversity certainly aren’t afraid to speak up at KU. Sadly, I’m afraid the same can’t be said for Chick-fil-A fans.
One KU faculty member — who wouldn’t use a name out of fear of reprisals against conservatives on campus — wrote of having friends and coworkers who feel they must shield their Chick-fil-A bags and wrappers from public view while on the KU campus.
That is inarguably an air of intolerance. And it’s preposterous to put forth that an art contest encouraging further denigration of the company won’t add to the climate of fear and intimidation against conservatives — or, truth be known, against anyone who eats at one of the nation’s leading fast-food restaurants.
Is that what we want at our institutions of higher learning?
I don’t know. I could hardly get anyone to comment about this. Maybe they, too, were afraid.
If so, Izabella Borowiak-Miller, a bright young conservative KU student, was not among them. She let me have it.
“To live in a world where a company can’t donate to an organization of their choosing is where we lose our freedom and become a dictatorship,” she wrote to me. “For the first time Christians had a company that inspired them to get closer to their faith, and because of all the social pressure Chick-fil-A backed down and stopped donating to the organizations it believed in. What will be the next targeted store?
“Being publicly conservative is social suicide. The media have forced conservatives into hiding, and when Chick-fil-A came out we finally had a voice and a business we could back. What more does the left want from us?”
Sherman’s scorched earth? Or is there a better way? We need to find a way to reconcile deeply held personal beliefs with just-as-deeply-held religious values. Maybe that “Coexist” bumper sticker so many people like would be a healthy start.
Life on the Mason-Dixon line must have been hell. This isn’t nearly as bad, and it’s certainly no piece of cake.
