Michele Bachmann and Chick-fil-a: Bilious Birds of a Feather – Patrons of Prejudice in Pictures and Prose

Worth a Thousand Words 3: Escape from the Planet of a Thousand Words

                                                                                                      

"Love is but a song we sing.

Fear a way we die.

You can make the mountains ring,

Or make the angels cry”

The Prose

So, what commonalities create a serving of this unappetizing, inedible and indigestible combo meal of Chick-fil-a and Michele Bachmann? Well, in addition to topicality, they both deserve to be revealed, reviled, ridiculed and removed from any serious public discourse.  Besides intolerance, ignorance and now ignominy one of the other traits shared by Bachmann and Dan Cathy, Chick-fil-a President and COO, is the inexcusable and sinful use of faith, spirituality and religion as justification for hatred and bigotry. Bachmann, of course, has a long, storied history of doing so while Cathy is much fresher a figure in the public arena but he has caught up quickly and has proven himself to be just as worthy an object of disparagement and derision. Should there actually exist the inferno that they both fear in the afterlife, they have equally assured themselves fiery, un-comfy chairs, personally monogrammed and anxiously awaiting their arrivals. Bachmann’s foolish and now dangerous McCarthy-esque crusade against what she claims to believe is the influence and infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood in the White House has resulted in death threats against public servant and Hillary Clinton aide, Huma Abedin.  The fast food pharaoh’s holier than thou, holy war against freedom and equality for homosexuals has been cast as a fight for the First Amendment by those on the Right who refuse to look beyond the faux-reality of Fox and the pot-stirring of Palin, and need to comprehend that the truth, much like his chicken, is considerably harder to swallow. Chick-fil-a, besides contributing to the growing obesity epidemic in our nation, contributes with even more malicious intent to organizations whose goals are not to defend religious autonomy and free thought but to discriminate against and destroy the LGBT community. Let me share some somber and significant specifics about the recipients of Chick-fil-a’s donated millions - the Family Research Council who considers homosexuals to be drug abusing, mentally ill, pedophiles is opposed to homosexual adoption and wants to reinstate sodomy laws making homosexuality a punishable crime; Focus on the Family who combat any effort to curb bullying against gay youth and argue against civil unions or domestic partnerships and, as with the aforementioned brethren hate group, deem homosexuality a mental illness; and finally there’s Exodus International, firm believers in “pray away the gay” and gay therapy and most vile, heinous and incomprehensible of all, backers of the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda. Those of you who so proudly took your bold stand by cueing for hours at Chick-fil-as though out the land on August 2^nd, please regard yourself as abominable, abhorrent and loathsome as the establishments just listed, for  willful ignorance, naivety and gullibility are not compelling defenses for appalling acts and attitudes.

The Pictures

And now, we wistfully revisit a taste of 1960’s innocence and idealism, a pre-Grace Slick Jefferson Airplane with Signe Anderson on vocals, performs the Youngbloods’ classic, “Get Together.”