THE CHURCH MILITANT
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Friday, November 22, 2019
CHICK-FIL-A PUT AN OBAMA & HILLARY CLINTON SUPPORTER IN CHARGE; DUMPED CHRISTIANS~TOUTS WORK OF "LGBTQ-INCLUSIVE & AFFIRMING" COVENANT HOUSE ON ITS WEBSITE-A PARTNERSHIP THAT WILL EXPAND IN 2020
CHRISTIANS DUPED AGAIN FOR THEIR
LACK OF DISCERNMENT
"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."
“To save its own corporate skin, Chick-fil-A has thrown good, biblical, organizations under the bus and legitimized the false narrative of the LGBT activists.”
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
ATLANTA —The popular fast food chain Chick-fil-A has been touting the work of a pro-homosexual organization since May of this year — long before the recent outcry over its plan to halt donations to the Salvation Army, which also boasts of its service to homosexuals, and in 2017, actually cancelled a contract with another Christian charity due to its anti-inclusive views. The chicken giant continues its established path to affirm pro-homosexual nonprofits despite telling Christians that it has not caved to the pressure of the “LGBT” agenda.
In its press release on Monday, the Chick-fil-A Foundation outlined that it would be “expanding [its] partnership” with Covenant House International in its desire to continue to address youth homelessness. The organization had been one of the recipients of Chick-fil-A’s 2019 True Inspiration Awards, which honors the legacy of founder S. Truett Cathy and recognizes the work of nonprofits that the restaurant chain applauds.
In May, the Chick-fil-A Foundation posted an update on how two organizations it supports financially — Atlanta Mission and Covenant House International — were “making an impact in the area of youth homelessness.” It noted that many young people who age out of the foster care system or the juvenile justice system become homeless.
“Still others find themselves without a home after coming out to their parents or caregivers,” Chick-fil-A wrote. “A 2017 Chapin Hall report found that LGBTQ youth disproportionately experience homelessness. In fact, LGBTQ young adults had a 120% higher risk of reporting homelessness, even though they make up just five to 10 percent of the overall youth population.”
In providing various details on the work of Covenant House International, the Chick-fil-A Foundation specifically noted that Covenant House California works with the True Colors Fund, which addresses homelessness among homosexual youth and works to make partner organizations more “LGBT-inclusive and affirming.”
True Colors Fund was co-founded by secular rocker Cyndi Lauper and her agent Jonny Podell, and states on its website, “We believe in a world where every LGBTQ young person, wherever they live, is celebrated for being their authentic selves.”
“In California, Covenant House California — also a 2019 True Inspiration Award winner — is partnering with the True Colors Fund and enhancing its services to LGBTQ youth,” Chick-fil-A noted in its writeup. “The True Colors Inclusion Assessment was designed to help agencies implement best practices to welcome and serve LGBTQ youth. Based on the assessment outcome, the True Colors United team guides the agency through the necessary steps to create a more LGBTQ-inclusive and affirming program and environment.”
Rodney Bullard, vice president of Corporate Social Responsibility at Chick-fil-A, Inc., and executive director of the Chick-fil-A Foundation, then remarked in a statement, “We’re proud to work alongside Atlanta Mission, Covenant House International, Covenant House California and many other organizations that are working to understand and address the root cause of youth homelessness.”
Covenant House International has a page on its website dedicated to “LGBT Youth and Homelessness,” which outlines its works both nationally and internationally to “ensure that our houses are welcoming, affirming, and safe for LGBTQ youth.”
Covenant House at NYC Pride parade. Click to enlarge.
According to the Chick-fil-A Foundation, in 2018, “Covenant House received $225,000 in support of national and local programs (in California and Georgia) that support youth facing homelessness” and “The Chick-fil-A Foundation has since committed to a significant partnership with Covenant House in 2020.”
As previously reported, in March, Think Progress reported that Chick-fil-A had advised the outlet that “[i]n 2017, a decision was made by the Chick-fil-A Foundation to no longer donate to the [Paul Anderson Youth Home] after a blog post from 2010 surfaced that does not meet Chick-fil-A’s commitment to creating a welcoming environment to all.”
Click to enlarge.
On Monday, controversy began stirring over whether or not Chick-fil-A had caved to complaints and resistance from homosexual advocacy groups after reports revealed that the company had discontinued donations to The Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Comments from Chick-fil-A President and Chief Operating Officer Tim Tassopoulos, as quoted by Bisnow, implied that the matter at least had some degree of influence in the decision.
“There’s no question we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” Chick-fil-A President and Chief Operating Officer Tim Tassopoulos was also quoted as stating. “There are lots of articles and newscasts about Chick-fil-A, and we thought we needed to be clear about our message.”
Tassapoulous serves on the advisory board of the Atlanta Area Council for the Boy Scouts of America.
As a result of the report, the Salvation Army released its own statement asserting that the charity was being mischaracterized in terms of its relationship to those who identify as homosexual. The organization, founded by evangelist William Booth in 1865, contended that it provides more assistance to homosexuals in poverty than any other charity.
“We’re saddened to learn that a corporate partner has felt it necessary to divert funding to other hunger, education and homelessness organizations — areas in which The Salvation Army, as the largest social services provider in the world, is already fully committed,” the organization wrote. “We serve more than 23 million individuals a year, including those in the LGBTQ+ community. In fact, we believe we are the largest provider of poverty relief to the LGBTQ+ population.”
“When misinformation is perpetuated without fact, our ability to serve those in need, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, religion or any other factor, is at risk,” it continued. “We urge the public to seek the truth before rushing to ill-informed judgment and greatly appreciate those partners and donors who ensure that anyone who needs our help feels safe and comfortable to come through our doors.”
The organization also linked to a page on its website that is dedicated to information about its efforts surrounding those who identify as homosexual or transgender.
“Almost one-third of transgender people have been rejected from an emergency shelter. The Salvation Army created a dorm in Las Vegas to offer safety and shelter to this group, which is statistically more vulnerable to assault,” it reads.
“LGBTQ Americans are more likely to be poor. Many face disproportionate job and housing insecurity due to discrimination. Your donation could mean rental and utilities assistance,” the page also outlines.
However, the Christian Post released an article the same day with the headline “Chick-fil-A denies capitulating to LGBT activists; Christian groups won’t be excluded from donations.”
“Beginning in 2020, the Chick-fil-A Foundation will introduce a more focused giving approach, donating to a smaller number of organizations working exclusively in the areas of hunger, homelessness and education,” the company told the site. “We have also proactively disclosed our 2018 tax filing and a preview of 2019 gifts to date on chick-fil-afoundation.org. The intent of charitable giving from the Chick-fil-A Foundation is to nourish the potential in every child.”
“Our goal is to donate to the most effective organizations in the areas of education, homelessness and hunger. No organization will be excluded from future consideration — faith-based or non-faith based,” it added.
On Tuesday, Franklin Graham took to social media to outline that he personally called Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy, who contended that the company had not changed because of pressure from homosexual advocates.
“I picked up the phone and called Dan Cathy. Dan was very clear that they have not bowed down to anyone’s demands, including the LGBTQ community,” he wrote.
“They will continue to support whoever they want to support. They haven’t changed who they are or what they believe. Chick-fil-A remains committed to Christian values. Dan Cathy assured me that this isn’t going to change. I hope all those who jumped to the wrong conclusion about them read this.”
“Franklin, you have done a huge disservice by not doing more investigation into Chick-fil-A’s betrayal and capitulation to the LGBT agenda. While Dan Cathy may say the company has the same values, the company’s statements and actions tell a different story,” he wrote.
Staver noted that, as stated, Chick-fil-A dropped the Paul Anderson Youth Home several years ago, and that Covenant House International is active in its homosexual advocacy.
“Covenant House also proudly supports the New York City Gay Pride parade with its own float, banners, t-shirts, and hashtag #CovUnity. Covenant House is recognized as a national funder of LGBTQ causes,” he outlined. “And Covenant House does not stop at LGBTQ activism; it also takes girls to abortion clinics.”
“To save its own corporate skin, Chick-fil-A has thrown good, biblical, organizations under the bus and legitimized the false narrative of the LGBT activists.”
As previously reported, Chick-fil-A has repeatedly stated since the original controversy in 2012 that the company intends to “leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena.”
RAINBOW MAFIA SAYS NOT ENOUGH: GAY RIGHTS GROUP DEMANDS MORE FROM PERSECUTED CHRISTIAN CHICK-FIL-A RESTAURANT~MEDIA MOSTLY OVERLOOKS SALVATION ARMY'S LONG STANDING PRO-LGBTQ & PRO-ABORTION POLICIES
“LGBTQ Americans are more likely to be poor. Many face disproportionate job and housing insecurity due to discrimination. Your donation could mean rental and utilities assistance,” the page also outlines.
However, the Christian Post released an article the same day with the headline “Chick-fil-A denies capitulating to LGBT activists; Christian groups won’t be excluded from donations.”“Beginning in 2020, the Chick-fil-A Foundation will introduce a more focused giving approach, donating to a smaller number of organizations working exclusively in the areas of hunger, homelessness and education,” the company told the site. “We have also proactively disclosed our 2018 tax filing and a preview of 2019 gifts to date on chick-fil-afoundation.org. The intent of charitable giving from the Chick-fil-A Foundation is to nourish the potential in every child.”“Our goal is to donate to the most effective organizations in the areas of education, homelessness and hunger. No organization will be excluded from future consideration — faith-based or non-faith based,” it added.On Tuesday, Franklin Graham took to social media to outline that he personally called Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy, who contended that the company had not changed because of pressure from homosexual advocates.“I picked up the phone and called Dan Cathy. Dan was very clear that they have not bowed down to anyone’s demands, including the LGBTQ community,” he wrote.“They will continue to support whoever they want to support. They haven’t changed who they are or what they believe. Chick-fil-A remains committed to Christian values. Dan Cathy assured me that this isn’t going to change. I hope all those who jumped to the wrong conclusion about them read this.”However, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel soon released an op-ed opining that Graham hasn’t done his research.“Franklin, you have done a huge disservice by not doing more investigation into Chick-fil-A’s betrayal and capitulation to the LGBT agenda. While Dan Cathy may say the company has the same values, the company’s statements and actions tell a different story,” he wrote.Staver noted that, as stated, Chick-fil-A dropped the Paul Anderson Youth Home several years ago, and that Covenant House International is active in its homosexual advocacy.“Covenant House also proudly supports the New York City Gay Pride parade with its own float, banners, t-shirts, and hashtag #CovUnity. Covenant House is recognized as a national funder of LGBTQ causes,” he outlined. “And Covenant House does not stop at LGBTQ activism; it also takes girls to abortion clinics.”“To save its own corporate skin, Chick-fil-A has thrown good, biblical, organizations under the bus and legitimized the false narrative of the LGBT activists.”As previously reported, Chick-fil-A has repeatedly stated since the original controversy in 2012 that the company intends to “leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena.”________________________________________________________SEE OUR PREVIOUS POSTS:
