The Chick-Fil-A controversy is tangential to a
bigger issue. The problem here has nothing to do with Dan Cathy's personal
beliefs, which he felt obliged to insert into the interview. It is
an issue that Cathy touches upon, ironically, in a clarification offered on
behalf of the company.
“We don’t claim to be a Christian business,” Cathy told the Biblical Recorder in a recent visit to North Carolina. He attended a
business leadership conference many years ago where he heard Christian
businessman Fred Roach say, “There is no such thing as a Christian business.”
“That got my attention,” Cathy said. Roach went
on to say, “Christ never died for a corporation. He died for you and me… In
that spirit … [Christianity] is about a personal relationship. Companies are
not lost or saved, but certainly individuals are,” Cathy added. “But as an
organization we can operate on biblical principles. So that is what we claim to
be. [We are] based on biblical principles, asking God and pleading with God to
give us wisdom on decisions we make about people and the programs and
partnerships we have. And He has blessed us.”
Nested in all that fundamentalist weirdness is a
vital message: Corporations are not people! If Christ cannot die for a
corporation, it is because a corporation does not have a soul. Corporatism is
deeply problematic because it reduces humanity to commodity - as asset or
liability. Corporatism is simply a permutation of nationalism and globalism -
all dehumanize the individual and humanize the collective.
Dan Cathy's comments are important because they
contain the remaining vestiture of an obsolete worldview. They are provocative
because he is clearly delineating the habiliments we are leaving
behind.
Regarding his comments on marriage: “We are
very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family
unit... We are very much committed to that,” Cathy emphasized. “We intend
to stay the course... We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but
thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate
on biblical principles.”
Cathy suffers from a great deal of ignorance about
where those family values come from. Long story short, marriage originated as
the design of modern men during a time when women were a man's legal property.
The term "husband" further refers to the institutionalized form in
relation to the spouse and offspring. Compare with the similar "husbandry" which in the 14th century referred to the care
of the household, but today means the "control or judicious use of
resources", conservation, and in agriculture, the cultivation of plants
and animals, and the science about its profession.
Bottom line is that Cathy's values are about control through the objectification and commodification of women, homosexuals, animals, and resources, in general. It is the "family" friendly variation of globalist, intelligencia values. In the former, you are a demographic. In the latter, you are a statistic. Faceless, nameless... a unit of power.
So let's talk about how the egregore Chick-Fil-A
husbands chickens...
... how Hitler husbands gays...
... how Republicans husband the earth...
Do the math.
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