Chick-fil-A has gone over to the dark side

Leftist harassment works

Chick-fil-A’s announcement that it was dumping the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which have come under attack by gay activist groups, caught Christian fans of the fast food chain by surprise. It shouldn’t have if they had been paying attention to CFA’s corporate structure.

The donations were coming out of the Chick-fil-A Foundation. The Executive Director of the CFA Foundation is Rodney D. Bullard, a former White House fellow and Assistant US Attorney. Some may have mistaken him for a conservative because he was a fellow in the Bush Administration, but he was an Obama donor, and, more recently, had donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign while at Chick-fil-A.

Like many corporations, Chick-fil-A branded its charitable giving as a form of social responsibility. Bullard became its Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility. Unlike charity, corporate social responsibility is a leftist endeavor to transform corporations into the political arms of radical causes. Like other formerly conservative corporations, Chick-fil-A had made the fundamental error of adopting the language and the infrastructure of its leftist peers. And that made what happened entirely inevitable.

In an interview with Business Insider earlier this year, Bullard emphasized that the Chick-fil-A Foundation had a "higher calling than any political or cultural war." The foundation boss was preparing the way for the shakeup that was coming in the fall. Even while he claimed that the CFA Foundation had a higher calling than a political or cultural war, he was preparing to accommodate the Left’s cultural war.

Bullard would have been seen as a safe bet. The CFA Foundation and the Christian groups it supported were so entangled that Bullard serves on the Salvation Army’s National Advisory Board and was on the National Board of Trustees of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. But Bullard’s vision was not that of charity, but of corporate social responsibility. And the two things are fundamentally different.

Charity helps people. Corporate social responsibility is virtue signaling by capitalists to anti-capitalists. Unlike charity, corporate social responsibility isn’t about helping people, but ticking off ideological and identity politics boxes like diversity and the environment. If people accidentally get helped in the process of helping a corporation signal its membership in the politically correct creed, that can’t be helped.

The Chick-fil-A Foundation will go on funding leftist groups like Atlanta's Westside Future Fund. The Westside Future Fund is a project of the Atlanta Committee for Progress together with former Mayor Kasim Reed. It will just opt out of funding Christian groups whose views offend anyone on the Left.

The $1.7 million that the Westside Future Fund shoveled in last year from the CFA Foundation vastly outpaces the mere $115,000 that the Salvation Army got for its Angel Tree program to provide gifts for poor children during the holidays. But even that low end six figure donation was too much and the gifts had to be snatched away from the kids by leftist pressure groups and identity politics protesters.

Sorry kids, our politics are more important than your presents.

A less publicized donation of $100,000 went to Sustainable Atlanta. That could have bought a lot of gifts. There was also a $10,000 donation to Saris to Suits whose mission is to "advance women's empowerment, education, gender equality, and social justice."

There’s money for social justice, but not for the Salvation Army.

There was $25,000 for UNICEF and $75,000 for the Andrew Young Foundation. That last one isn’t a surprise. Carter’s radical UN ambassador sits on the CFA Foundation’s advisory board. $20,000 went to the Latino Leaders Network, another $20,000 to the Harvard Debate Diversity Network, $45,000 to the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and $5,000 was allotted to Friends of Refugees.

The latter boasts of resettling the sort of refugees who would demand that Chick-fil-A go Halal.

There’s money for Muslim refugees, but not for the Salvation Army.

And that’s the tip of the iceberg. “Diversity”, “equity”, and “social justice” are typical buzzwords associated with many of the organizations that the Chick-fil-A Foundation had been funding. And that’s typical of corporate social responsibility ventures which are all about pictures of smiling poor children cradling green plants accompanied by women in hijabs. There’s nothing unusual about that.

But most conservatives thought, without investigating, that Chick-fil-A was different. It wasn’t another corporate social behemoth. It didn’t answer to shareholders and stakeholders. It had a biblical vision. And, it was under fire for donating to Christian groups. But even when the CFA Foundation donated to Christian organizations, it was also pouring a lot of money into conventional social justice causes.

The controversy and arguments over the donations to organizations like the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes conveniently distracted from where a lot of the money was going.

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes had received a mere $25,000 last year. Far less than the funds that poured into Andrew Young’s non-profit empire. A fig leaf.

Now the fig leaf is gone and the reality is that the Chick-fil-A Foundation is just another corporate leftist charity that lavishes cash on organizations linked to local Democrats and assorted diversity causes.

Without the fig leaf, the Chick-fil-A Foundation is no different than the other corporate charities run by their own equivalents of Bullard, men and women who had spent enough time in government to get a  useless job in the corporate world, and its abandonment of Christian conservatives was an inevitability.

And the question is what will the Christians who made Chick-fil-A boom do now?

They can either fight to hold Chick-fil-A accountable or shrug and accept another loss. Most of the country’s major brands are pipelines of cash that lead directly to leftist causes. Hardly any of the money that conservatives spend on products and services every day ends up going to conservative causes.

Major brands hammer the air with ad campaigns that directly attack the values and rights of ordinary Americans. And, most Americans, including conservatives, keep on buying from the same huge conglomerates like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Diageo (Johnny Walker), RBI (Burger King and Popeyes), General Mills, and from retailers like Walmart, Target, and Amazon, despite their leftist politics.

Chick-fil-A was supposed to be different. If there’s any company that conservatives can hold accountable, this is it. And if they can’t hold Chick-fil-A accountable, then what’s left?

Accountability doesn’t just begin with restoring donations to worthy charities like the Salvation Army, but a serious reevaluation of the Chick-fil-A Foundation’s leadership and its overall charitable priorities.

If Chick-fil-A wants to be in the business of corporate social responsibility, rather than charity, it will over time become increasingly hostile to the very customers who made it successful. Corporate social responsibility will take it down the same dark road of virtue signaling and political correctness.

Then, before you know it, there will be a Chick-fil-A ad campaign about toxic masculinity.

And then the legacy of its founder will be as thoroughly lost as the legacies of the founders of so many other great American companies whose modern incarnations slavishly serve anti-American causes.

That would be a tragedy. This is a test of whether that tragedy is truly inevitable.

It’s also a warning. If conservatives had paid closer attention to the Chick-fil-A Foundation’s leadership, Bullard’s $1,000 donation to Hillary Clinton in 2016 would have provided a warning of what was coming.

Organizations don’t trend rightward. They trend leftward. Any organization that isn’t closely watched will go the way of the Chick-fil-A Foundation. If this can happen at Chick-fil-A, it can happen anywhere.

SOURCE 





The "National Geographic's" Gone All PC Again

Malcolm Smith

The National Geographic is lucky I have a subscription, because I wouldn't have purchased the November 2019 issue if I'd seen it on the magazine stands.

The National Geographic, as you no doubt aware, functions to introduce its readers to interesting geographic sites around the world. This mission has permitted them to include such fields as wildlife, archaeology, and prehistoric life into their ambit. Occasionally, they have gone off onto tangents: such as discussions on chocolate, the sense of smell, and the King James Bible, all of which were nevertheless worth reading. But in February 2017 issue they lost the plot completely with an issue devoted to "gender". This month they have done it again, and devoted the issue to "Women".

      To be fair, there are a couple if useful geographic articles in it - such as the one about the women who patrol the streets of New Delhi to make it safe, and "Rwanda's renewal by women", where they hold 60% of parliamentary seats. (What's wrong with Rwandan men that they aren't prepared to run for office?) Also, the data it provides is more sensible that in the "gender" issue - not that that is a hard bench mark to cross! Some of it you can actually agree with.

     Nevertheless, the issue is basically political, not geographic - and politically biased as well. It includes a section on prominent women's contributions, more reminiscent of Time's periodic profiles of leaders. One of these is astrophysicist Rebecca Oppenheimer, who is actually a trans women. "Though her body looked male, her childhood self-portraits showed a girl named Rebecca." She transitioned in 2014 although, as she put it, "I like to say I stopped pretending to be a boy."

Now, I have previously related my experience with transsexuals. If Dr Oppenheimer is now legally a woman, I am prepared to go along with the legal fiction. But there is something wrong with the way the magazine describes this as if it were  perfectly normal. Also, surely it is grotesque that they hold up as an example of feminine achievement a "woman" who is really a man, especially since most of his achievements would have been made while he was still legally male?

     But where the magazine really loses the plot, and turns into simply a politico-social issue, is the six multi-page sections entitled, "Speak Up", where multiple prominent women provide answers to such questions as "What is you greatest strength?" and "What needs to change in the next 10 years?" It's a pity they didn't ask: "What has this got to do with the mission of the National Geographic Society?

     What makes it bad even for a socio-political perspective is that it never engages with any alternative opinions. Just as the "gender" issue never discussed mental illness or suggested that transition might be dangerous, the present issue assumes, without any suggestion to the contrary, that the feminist position is not only obviously right; it is the only one which exists.

      Thus, the statistic on the number of national legislative seats held by women. What is the point? Do they think Parliament exists in order to provide careers for politicians, or to represent the people? If the latter, do they think only women can represent women? If so, why should the other half of the human race vote for them?

      People who talk about "gender equality" don't really mean it. They think they do, but they really mean that feminine lifestyles are inferior, and that the only way that women can be "equal" is to adopt masculine lifestyles. I have provided examples elsewhere as to how this unconscious assumption is embedded in the whole feminist outlook. So what about this statistic on page 108?

43% of women - compared with 23% of men - in the U.S. have taken at least a year off with no earnings, usually to tend a child or provide other caregiving, says the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Census Bureau data show women make 80 cents for every dollar men make. But when the institute  factored in women's time away from full-time work in a 15-year period, the gap widened to 49 cents for each dollar.

     Good heavens! Where do these people get the idea that men and women live separate lives? Do they think that husbands spend all their earnings on themselves while their wives are left to spend their (49%) earnings on themselves? They ought to look up the word, hyergamy. Only as a last resort will women marry, or even date, a man socially or financially inferior.  The reason for women's lower earnings is that they marry men who can support them while they do feminine things, like taking care of children.

     The fundamental feminist fallacy - that women must adopt masculine lifestyles - is never questioned. Thus, the article on women in the military assumes that it is somehow a good thing, and not an outrage, nor is their any mention of the sexual assaults and sexual scandals involved, or the chicanery involved in addressing women's physical weakness. All we have is a female marine saying: "Women learn weakness. We can also unlearn it." Yeah, right!

     Likewise, the writer of the article on women in science has apparently never heard of the gender paradox:  the fact that, as societies become more gender equal in their policies, men and women adopt different careers. Or, to put it another way,  if you equalise culture, it allows biological differences to come to the fore.

Thus, page 117 provides a graph of the U.S. workplace representation of the sexes. We learn that science in general, and biology in particular, has the same proportion of women as the workplace average. However, the average female participation for health workers is 72.6%, rising to 97.1% for dental hygienists. It is not suggested that this is a bad thing, or that they choose these careers because they are not allowed into others. However, common sense should tell you that if women are over-represented in some fields, they must be under-represented in others: such as engineering, which is only 15.9% female.

For some reason, this is supposed to be a bad thing. The author discusses some high profile sexual harassment cases, but surely no-one suggests that hosts of women are applying for engineering careers, then dropping out due to bad experiences? Why can't they just accept that men and women are different, and choose different careers?

     The whole tenor of the issue is set by the first essay, "Why the future should be female". Complete with several pages of huge feminist posters, it adopts without question the fundamental feminist assumption: that feminine lifestyles are inferior, and so they must become more masculine.

So why do men hold more power than women today? Why does gender inequality persist? The explanation is so often: It's just the way it's always been. That's simply not good enough.

     Sorry, madam, but it is. If something is universal, and has been around as long as human memory runs, it usually means it is hard wired in our genes. Not only is patriarchy universal in human society, and always has been, but it is the default position in monkey and ape societies. It's not going away any time soon. In fact, in mixed company women become quieter, less assertive, and more compliant because, as a woman sociologist has shown,  deferential women are more likely to get husbands.

But why go back to evolutionary history when we only have to look around us? The most popular genre of fiction, amounting to 40% of mass market paperbacks, is love stories. The readership is almost wholly female, and they all feature alpha males.

Feminist publishers tried to get their authors to write more gender equal plots, but it didn't work. The authors didn't want to write them, and the readers didn't want to read them. And what is the most successful pornographic novel of all time?  Fifty Shades of Grey? Who would have thought that a story about a woman being subjugated and abused would be written by a woman, promoted by women reviewers, be read mostly by women, and would sell 125 million copies? So don't try arguing it's not hard wired in our genes.

     Some advice to the publishers: your magazine is called National Geographic, not National Political. We buy it because we want to vicariously visit exotic foreign localities. If we want to read biased feminist propaganda we can do it for free on the internet.

SOURCE 





Pro-Trans Advertising Doesn’t Reflect Most of America

To hear college students and corporate consumer-product commercials tell it, gender fluidity is so normal, popular even, that they’re simply communicating these ideas as a way to reflect the new progressivism in America.

Only that’s not exactly the case. Their ideas aren’t at all in sync with the rest of the country.

Still, that doesn’t stop college students from talking about the “infinite” number of genders, or corporations from selling Sprite with a commercial about transgenderism and breast-binding to boot, minus any mention of the soft drink itself.

A June 2019 Gallup poll reported Americans greatly overestimate the size of the gay and transgender population in the United States. The reason seems apparent: LGBT-perpetuated concepts of gender fluidity are ubiquitous, even sensationalized, within higher education and in ad campaigns for consumer products.

In a video PragerU.com produced, Will Witt went to the University of California at Berkeley and asked a number of college students, both men and women, how many genders exist. Answers ranged from “infinite” and “like, five or six, maybe,” to “gender is a construct that’s made up” and “like, 72-plus or something.”

While most students were unable to name more than a half-dozen “genders,” all of the students Witt’s video clip showed sounded absolutely sure there were multiple genders.

Most of the rest of America disagrees.

More than half of the adults in a 2017 Pew Research poll said they think sex is assigned at birth: 80% of respondents who lean Republican think one’s sex is either male or female, while 34% who lean Democratic do.

An Ipsos poll found that among Western countries, Americans are most likely to think that transgender people have a mental illness, and they are the most likely to “say that society has gone too far in allowing people to dress and live as one sex even though they were born another,” although both of those positions represented only about one-third of American respondents.

So, Americans have yet to fully embrace the concept that gender is “fluid” and that a person can transition from one gender to another, yet it’s presented at colleges as a common belief.

A Sprite soft-drink commercial that aired recently in Argentina highlighted this strange paradox well.

In one scene, a mother is helping her adult child put makeup on and a grandmother is helping a young man dress in drag, and in another scene, a sibling or mother is helping a female put on a chest binder, so she can appear more male, a practice widely acknowledged to be harmful.

The Binding Health Project at Boston University, which specifically studied the impact of chest binding on transgender people, showed that most people who did chest binding had experienced at least one negative outcome, including “pain, overheating, and shortness of breath.”

Even though the ad was apparently released in time for a gay pride parade in Buenos Aires, the commercial has nothing whatsoever to do with selling or drinking Sprite.

In like fashion, a number of ads released in June for America’s “Pride Month” celebrate the LGBT community even as the products they are supposedly pitching are hardly mentioned, even though gender fluidity is hardly a recognized concept among the rest of America.

It’s not unlike “Latinx,” the progressive, gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina used at some universities. But Mario Carrasco of the market research agency Think Now reports, according to his survey on the issue, only 2% of Hispanics polled even like or use that term.

While all this corporate shilling for gender fluidity and “woke” progressivism on college campuses doesn’t reflect mainstream America’s views, it does hurt young people. This faux popularity can influence more teenagers to reject the concept that gender is binary.

Young people are probably the group most susceptible to commercials. That in turn could lead to peer pressure within the group to be transgender even though they aren’t.

Dr. Lisa Littman, a Brown University School of Public Health assistant professor, calls it “rapid-onset dysphoria”—that is, dysphoria as a social contagion, in much the same way youths used to get drunk or get high because of peer pressure to do so.

Littman was widely criticized for the study, despite its scientific basis and logical conclusions: Adolescents and teenagers are heavily peer-sensitive in every other respect, so why not also when it comes to this?

College campuses and corporate marketing campaigns exert great influence over the country’s psyche, especially the younger population. But don’t buy what they’re selling: They’re not actually in sync with the rest of America.

SOURCE 






Australia: Update from Bettina on firefighters

Just a quick post-script to my recent firefighter skirmish.

Last week I heard from a professional firefighter telling me he’d approached his employers for funding for a small event to be held on International Men’s Day. He was told none was available but he could “apply for funding” for possible future events. Last March their organization, which consists of over 95% male employees, held lavish celebrations for International Women’s Day.

Here’s what he wrote to me: “I would love for you to be a voice for male firefighters to bring attention to this brazen inequality and insult to men; who risk their lives for others day in day out during their professional careers as firefighters. As you know, sadly in this current climate it is probably not wise for me to make noise about it myself for the backlash and fallout may be career limiting. 😔”

I was very happy to be able to appear on Sky News last Tuesday, for International Men’s Day. And my short interview with Chris Kenny did focus on our brave firemen and the fallout over former Victorian equal opportunity commissioner Moira Rayner’s attempt to smear me.

We’ve made a short video of that interview. Given that over 5,600 people ‘liked’ her twitter post having a go at me, it would be great if you could circulate this video so people know she fell flat on her face. Here’s the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYF3hSAgG4

Via email

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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