Chick-fil-A has long had a reputation problem when it comes to the LGBTQ community. Most notoriously, comments made by CEO Dan Cathy in 2012 that marriage should be between a man and a woman saw Americans denying themselves chicken sandwiches in nationwide boycotts and staging protests at Chick-fil-A restaurants around the country, and other Americans joining Mike Huckabee in going and buying even more chicken sandwiches to demonstrate their approval.
But going back even further than Cathy’s public comments is the company’s history of donating money and products to historically anti-LGBTQ groups and charities, including the The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the Paul Anderson Youth Home, and the Salvation Army — which, it revealed on Monday, it will be amending from next year.
“Beginning in 2020, the Chick-fil-A Foundation is introducing a more focused giving approach to deepen its giving to a smaller number of organizations in three primary areas,” Chick-fil-A’s website now says. Those areas, already covered by the ditched groups, are education, homelessness, and hunger.
In 2011, controversy and subsequently boycotts stemmed from a Pennsylvania branch donating food to marriage seminars held by an anti-LGBTQ organisation. Once this became national news, so did the company’s donations to groups known to discriminate or actively advocate against LGBTQ people, campaign against marriage equality, run damaging “conversion therapy” programs, and enjoy vocal public support from anti-LGBTQ activists.
Equality Matters found that in 2010, the company gave $8 million to its associated charitable foundation, WinShape, of which around $2 million went to anti-LGBTQ groups.
More recently, across 2016 and 2017, the latest years that nonprofit tax returns were available, the Chick-fil-A Foundation (founded in 2012) donated nearly $3 million to anti-LGBTQ organisations. This included $2.75 million to The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which requires its student members to sign a sexual “purity” pledge and bars employees from “homosexual acts,” and around $197,000 to the Salvation Army.
(While the latter organisation has been at pains to dismantle its reputation for homophobia and transphobia across its chapters, as recently as 2011 its official Position Statement called for same-sex attracted people to remain celibate according to the New York Times, it’s had to disavow officials’ public statements that gay people “deserve to die,” and in 2016 it refused to support the Australian government’s LGBTQ-focused anti-bullying schools program.)
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Chick-fil-A has not shared the reasoning behind the cessation of funding, beyond saying it was to “create more clarity.”
“We made multi-year commitments to both organizations and we fulfilled those obligations in 2018,” a spokesperson told Reuters.
So it seems that now that their “commitment” to the organisations in question is over, the company has simply chosen not to re-up.
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What’s more, the company refused to rule out ever donating to anti-LGBTQ groups again. "No organization will be excluded from future consideration — faith-based or non-faith-based," Chick-fil-A President and COO Tim Tassopoulos told VICE in a statement. (For what it’s worth, they haven’t ruled out partnering with LGBTQ+ organisations either.)
Chick-Fil-A is still the preferred chicken sandwich product for anyone wishing to Own The Libs on their lunch break. Its employee policy does not protect LGBTQ staff, as a GLAAD spokesperson noted. And as recently as October, the chain’s only UK branch announced its lease would not be extended after LGBTQ groups organised protests at its location in Reading.
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For customers still torn between denying themselves delicious chicken and looking like they may possibly agree with Mike Huckabee on anything, this may appear a positive step. But the fact remains that not only has Chick-fil-A not served up any substantial, ideological or moral reasoning for this shift in their charity priorities, but they’re still a family company whose CEO quite openly doesn’t believe in the validity of thousands of families.
If their stance up til now has been enough to keep those red and white bags out of your hands, there’s no real reason for that to change now.
Topics Social Good
