Chick-Fil-A may serve waffle fries, but they don’t waffle on the issue of gay rights: They are definitely against them.
According to a new report from LGBT advocacy organization Equality Matters, the chicken-serving fast food joint donated nearly $2 million to anti-gay groups in 2009, the most recent year that data is available. That year’s donations by Chick-Fil-A’s charitable arm WinShape included $1,733,699 to six different religious organizations that Equality Matters has classified as “anti-gay”:
–Marriage & Family Legacy Fund: $994,199
–Fellowship Of Christian Athletes: $480,000
–National Christian Foundation: $240,000
–Focus On The Family: $12,500
–Eagle Forum: $5,000
–Exodus International: $1,000
–Family Research Council: $1,000
Some of these organizations are “more” anti-gay than others. The Marriage and Family Fund, which received the majority of the donations, is a group that says it wants to promote “stable, lasting families,” which sounds nice until you realize it was formed by the the Marriage CoMission, a coalition of groups formed to stand against “the downward spiral of marriage and the traditional family in America.” Something tells us they’re not out to protest straight couples getting divorced.
Other groups are more explicit. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, for instance, preaches about “freeing” gays from a life of sin through God, while Focus On The Family’s James Dobson has gone on record saying the “homosexual agenda is a beast [that] wants our kids.”
Of course, Chick-Fil-A, has never been shy about its religious leanings — as anyone who’s tried to get a chicken sandwich on Sunday knows — but the company has denied on multiple occasions that it has an anti-gay agenda, or even a political agenda of any kind. Do these donations put the lie to those claims?
