I never liked Chick-fil-A .  Not fair, I suppose, since I’ve never been to one.  Never had much call to, being vegetarian and all.  But I don’t like their name, it looks stupid.  I also don’t care for their commercials with the cows asking people to eat more chicken–again, ludicrously misspelled because apparently, although the cows have learned English, they can’t master spelling.  Whatever.  The only real impact Chick-fil-A has on my life is that they sponsor a college football game every year that I watch in dismay as an SEC team, usually Alabama, blows out some hapless other team.

So the guy in charge of Chick-fil-A said he’s against gay marriage.  And his company donates to anti-gay marriage groups.  As a result, people are organizing boycotts of the company.  Well, if they succeed it means I won’t have to see those ads any more.  Also, the mayor of Boston is saying he doesn’t want a Chick-fil-A in his city on account of this.  I am not sure if he can forbid a company from opening up shop on account of its owner’s political views, but then I am not even sure if it might move to Boston.  It seems like it’s more of a Southern restaurant.

I guess the problem with boycotting is that it is more likely to be felt by the employees of Chick-fil-A than the upper management.  That’s often the way with boycotts.  The original boycotting effort was different than subsequent consumer actions named after it because in the first case, everyone in town ostracized and refused to serve Charles Boycott personally.  It was actually more like a labor strike.  (It was also an instance of community organization which Glenn Beck would no doubt deem “Alinskyite” except that it happened 30 years before Alinsky was born.)