Britain shuts down Chick-fil-A (P.S. Pete Buttigieg Loves Chick-fil-A)
I was excited to hear the news of the arrival and swift departure of Chick-fil-A’s first branch in England. LGBTQ rights campaigners and allies there protested and boycotted the anti-gay chicken chain, urging them to “cluck off”. Only eight days after opening, the property owners of the Reading branch announced that they would not renew Chick-fil-A’s six month lease. This triumph against hate made me feel hope again for the goodness of Britain, showing that British values, which are meant to be about personal freedom, openness, tolerance, and mutual respect, are still alive even after Brexit.
As a Briton who’s been living in the US for nearly three years, this news made me wonder why America seemed so different, why I wasn’t hearing stories of Americans successfully shutting down Chick-fil-As, why the chain is the third largest fast food chain in the USA, and why it is its most profitable. Britons might exclaim that there’s no room for Chick-fil-A in a country that brought in marriage equality in 2013. But the USA also enacted same-sex marriage rights just two years later. Well, at least Britain didn’t elect a bigot like Trump, though a majority of Brits did vote for a racist, xenophobic and ludicrously arrogant thing called Brexit (and of course only a minority of Americans actually voted for Trump).
I would love to allow the patriotic Briton inside me to shriek with glee that I’m better than Americans, but that’s the same sort of attitude that brought about Brexit in the first place. We’re really not all that different. This same month Chick-fil-A also managed to open another branch in the UK, up in Scotland, and no one seems to have noticed. The Reading branch wasn’t run out of town purely because good upstanding Brits wouldn’t allow it, but more because Reading Pride ran a really good anti-Chick-fil-A campaign, one that spiraled into something that made Brits feel better about themselves, for being better than Americans.
I’ve spoken to American fans of Chick-fil-A, even queer ones. When a new branch opened near my city two years ago, a gaggle of local gays decided to go try it out, but with a promise to ‘act really gay’ while they ate their ‘hate sandwiches’. They’d still be giving the company their money, which could be used to fund actions against them, but as long as they could take an outrageous ironic selfie, that’s all that mattered. It’s become one of the American LGBTQ community’s guiltiest pleasures and the only time that anyone was genuinely willing to give up on Chick-fil-A was when another chain, Popeyes, launched a chicken sandwich that was actually better than the ‘hate sandwich’. Don’t make a mistake though — Popeyes’s success wasn’t because of the superior sandwich but because the viral marketing campaign around it caught fire.
One key difference between Brits and Americans is that Brits are less religious, tend to believe in less hateful faiths when they are religious, and most crucially, believe that religion is a private matter. I remember working in Texas a few years ago and being astonished at how often this question came up in casual conversation — “What church do you go to?” No acquaintance, work colleague, nor even most friends would ask you this in Britain. Because of this attitude towards faith, it simply isn’t appealing to want to patronise a particular restaurant for putting religion in their branding. Even if you’re a Brit who does believe that God hates fags, you don’t want it shoved down your throat along with your lunch. Back in Texas, Chick-fil-A’s popularity is in large part because of what it symbolises. Seriously, the amount of conversations you can overhear at a Chick-fil-A about Jesus is well higher than anywhere other than at a church — when I last tried it I even found myself sat next to a table of young teenagers dipping nuggets and discussing why gay marriage was wrong. The kids are not alright!
Another difference between Britons and Americans is that Brits particularly love to be sanctimonious, though America’s snowflake generation is doing well to take up the practice of feigning righteousness. Homo darling of the 2020 Democratic Presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg loves Chick-fil-A and he argued that boycotting a company like that is pointless because it’s impossible to boycott everything that goes against your morals — “If you’re turned off, as I am, by the political behavior of Chick-fil-A or their executives — if that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, so to speak, and you decide not to shop there, I’d certainly get it and I’d support that. But the reality is, we, I think, sometimes slip into a sort of virtue signaling in some cases where we’re not really being consistent. I mean, what about all the other places we get our chicken from? […] I do not approve of their politics, but I kind of approve of their chicken.”
This outlook is just gross. Of course it is impossible to locate every single culprit worthy of our disgust, but that doesn’t mean we should shrug our shoulders and not bother standing up for anything. Indeed with this sort of viewpoint, what does Mayor Pete actually stand for, other than to urge us not to waste time standing for anything? Even when our values intersect with hypocrisy, it doesn’t mean we should abandon those values. Perhaps the snowflakes are right to hate on everything — at they’re at least doing something. They’re giving a voice, and if it gets loud enough, like Reading Pride’s campaign did or like Popeyes’s marketing miracle did, good stuff can happen.
Liam Campbell is editor of Elska Magazine, a project about revealing the bodies and voices of gays around the world whatever their beliefs, preferences, or tastes reveal.
