Jerks and Liars: Updates on Recent Stories

A quick follow-up to stories from just the past couple of days.

On Friday I wrote about some of the responses, good and bad, to the shootings in Aurora, Colorado. In my description of how little we knew at the time (not that we’re much more enlightened now), I said that James Holmes “was apparently reclusive, and his mother is on record saying she’s not surprised by his actions: ‘You have the right person,’ she says.” Turns out we didn’t even know that, or not for sure, anyway.

Now Arlene Holmes, through a lawyer, is disputing ABC News’s characterization of her remarks. Here’s her statement:

I was awakened by a call from a reporter by ABC on July 20 about 5:45 in the morning. I did not know anything about a shooting in Aurora at that time. He asked if I was Arlene Holmes and if my son was James Holmes who lives in Aurora, Colorado. I answered yes, you have the right person. I was referring to myself.

I asked him to tell me why he was calling and he told me about a shooting in Aurora. He asked for a comment. I told him I could not comment because I did not know if the person he was talking about was my son, and I would need to find out.

ABC News is standing by its story that producer Matthew Mosk had indeed called her at 5:45 a.m. California time, but that the conversation had gone the way it was described on air on Friday.

Two things are clear. 1). Mosk is an asshole. I don’t care how important you think your “need to know” is, or how much you want to scoop the other guy, you don’t call a mother in the middle of the night to tell her that her son is a mass murderer and ask if she’d like to comment. Not unless you’re the police. Period. End of discussion. 2). Somebody’s lying. Is it the news agency that’s already had to apologize once for the unprofessional musings of Brian Ross? Or is it the shocked mother, who might have realized a little too late that a). she was further incriminating her son and b). she didn’t look too good, either, if she suspected a propensity for violence and did nothing to stop it?

I don’t know, and neither does anyone else other than Ms. Holmes and Mr. Mosk, as there’s no recording of the conversation. But the phrasing has gnawed at me since the beginning. “You have the right person” sure seems to support Holmes’s story over Mosk’s. Had the interview gone the way Mosk says it did, the much more probable response would have been “They [the police] have the right man [“person” is generally used only when the gender isn’t clear].” Am I guessing? You bet. But I’ll give you 10 to 1 on this one.

I doubt that we’ll ever know for sure, but even the likelihood that ABC butchered the story again and are now frantically engaged in ass-covering doesn’t look good.

On Saturday, in my piece on the silliness of using these events to ban costumes, I also wrote, “whether the Aurora theatre will be sued remains to be seen—if that emergency exit door was literally propped open, as some news reports have suggested (and we all know how accurate they’ve been throughout this process, right?), then maybe they deserve it.”

Well, someone is indeed about to sue the theatre. And Warner Brothers. And Holmes’s doctors. And the company that made Holmes’s breakfast cereal. OK, I made the last one up. Unfortunately, not the rest. One Torrence Brown, Jr., who wasn’t hurt in the incident, has nonetheless hired a shyster named Donald Karpel because the bad man made him cry he is now suffering from extreme trauma.

OK, it might be possible that the movie theatre is liable if they didn’t take appropriate precautions to secure the door through which Holmes entered. Maybe. But the plaintiff in such a case would have some serious ‘splainin’ to do. The rest of it? Unmitigated feces. “The Dark Knight Rises” is a violent film? No shit? And little Mr. Brown didn’t know that? Karpel says Holmes “partially mimicked” the violence of the film he interrupted. Maybe. But I checked out all the official previews of the film, and not a one of them shows anything remotely like what happened in Colorado. Since the film premiered that night (that was the whole point of the midnight show, after all), no one could have predicted any similarity that did exist… except in the sense that pretty much all action movies trot out the same schtik with minor variations. In other words, Karpel is full of crap. But you knew that.

Finally on the “Dark Knight” front is news that Christian Bale really did visit shooting victims at the Medical Center of Aurora. I had written, of course, that the Internet solicitation of him to do so was unethical. I still believe that, and I still think his appearance will be regarded by many (including me) as a publicity stunt to attract more press for the movie, whether Warner Brothers said he wasn’t there to represent the movie or not.

The good news is that his visits were actually few in number (only seven victims—presumably those whose recovery wouldn’t be adversely affected by his presence, plus first responders, hospital staff, etc.), he didn’t concentrate on seeing kids, and he wasn’t in costume. The bad news is that we now established further precedent that celebrities can be summoned forth by every pushy fan with a “cool” idea.

And so on to the other recent story. I wrote Saturday, also, about two stories involving Chick-fil-A: the publicizing of the company’s anti-gay rights campaigns, and the unethical attempts by Boston Mayor Thomas M. Mennino to keep them out of his city.

And, the pendulum has swung back. After an announcement by the Jim Henson Company that they would be suspending future relations with Chick-fil-A over gay rights issues, the food chain has gone hard-core into sour grapes. The sign shown here was reportedly displayed at the Chick-fil-A outlet in the Shops at Willow Bend in Plano, Texas. The image was splashed all over my Facebook feed this afternoon. I must confess, I thought it was a fake. The coincidence was too neat, the safety issue so manifestly nonsense, and the “children getting their fingers stuck in the holes of the puppets” too conveniently a vulgar joke. Apparently, however, it’s real.

If so, then yes, they really are that stupid. And yes, this ultra-Christian company is a little too ready to, you know, bear false witness. They claim to have withdrawn the Henson toys in question as of July 19, but no I can find no indication that they made any such move prior to today, July 24, oh so coincidentally a couple of days after the Henson company ended their relationship. Chick-fil-A is acting like the junior high kid who doesn’t want to admit to having been dumped. Trouble is, they’re supposed to be proud of their sanctimony. That’s not working out so well.

OK: I doubt that anyone from Chick-fil-A will ever read this, but in case you do… I disagree with you as profoundly as it is possible to do about gay rights, but I support your right to do with your corporate profits whatever you choose, so long as you’re not breaking any laws. This does not, however, extend to getting into a snit about a failed business partnership and lying about the cause of your petulance, de facto libeling a reputable company. I don’t claim to be omniscient, however: show me any credible evidence that the “voluntary withdrawal” of Henson toys, supposedly ordered as of last Thursday, in fact existed before Henson ended their relationship with you, and I’ll apologize loudly and abjectly. Fail to do so, however, and I will continue to regard you not merely as theological hypocrites, but also as plain old garden-variety liars.

Only a Politician Could Make Me Side with Chick-fil-A

I used to eat lunch at Chick-fil-A maybe three times a month. I don’t, now. Part of the reason is that I found out about their position on gay rights, but I’d be lying if I said that the fact that their outlet isn’t as accessible as it used to be prior to renovations in our University Center didn’t play a role, too. Still, I’ve passed on plenty of opportunities in recent months to grab a sandwich from them—in airports, in malls, and such. I’m not adamant about it: I don’t recall having been to a Chick-fil-A in a couple of years, but I freely admit that I might have, and I don’t actively discourage anyone else from patronizing their outlets: after all, they make a pretty good chicken sandwich.

Part of my rationale, of course, is that my one-man protest isn’t going to make even a fraction of a dent in Chick-fil-A’s bottom line. This is the same reasoning by which I didn’t make a big deal out of boycotting General Mills when they starting bullying a small Utah bakery or Target when they made a series of questionable political contributions. The other part of the reasoning is that if I were to refuse to deal with any corporation with whom I disagree, profoundly, on at least one political or ethical issue, I’d have to hole up in a cave somewhere without mass-produced clothes, a cell phone, packaged food, and a whole lot of other things I kind of like having as part of my life. You pick your battles. I don’t go to Chick-fil-A if I can help it, but that decision is ultimately more about making me feel morally superior than about denying them profits.

Anyway, Chick-fil-A has been in the news twice in recent days. The first time was when CEO Dan Cathy (left) told K. Allan Blume of Baptist Press that his corporation is “guilty as charged” of contributing to a host of anti-equality causes… of course, it was written up as “supporting the traditional family,” but everyone on both sides of the issue knew exactly what he meant.

Here’s the rationale:

We are very much supportive of the family—the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

We operate as a family business ... our restaurants are typically led by families; some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that.

We intend to stay the course. We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles.

The statement is rife with the kind of code words we have come to expect: “biblical definition of the family unit,” for example, seems to omit, oh, say, Solomon’s 700 wives and 300 concubines. This kind of selective enforcement carries over into the corporation’s practices, too: “there are a couple of passages in Deuteronomy that could be interpreted as opposing homosexuality, so we’ll give millions of dollars to deny the right to marry to a few million Americans. But that part of the same book that forbids eating pork products (that would be Deuteronomy 14:8, for those of you following along at home)… well, that clearly doesn’t apply to our bacon, egg and cheese biscuit.” And I bet they don’t spend millions trying to keep people from eating shrimp (Leviticus 11:9-12) or getting tattoos (Leviticus 19:28), either.

Ultimately, though, I can’t get too exorcised about this. Cathy is just another in a long list of pseudo-Christian hypocrites who select the Biblical passages that suit their prejudices and ignore the rest. It’s not the process of selection that’s the problem, of course: forcing a rape victim to marry her assailant (Deuteronomy 22:28-29) isn’t something any of the real Christians I know would condone, let alone command. Rather, it’s the ultra-pious strutting that annoys me. But, as I said earlier, it would be tough to survive if we didn’t ultimately do business with a company run by a pompous fraud. And, to be fair, at least we know where Chick-fil-A stands… in a post-Citizens United world, that company you like so much could be dropping millions into the campaign coffers of the Michele Bachmanns of the world, for all you know.

So… story #2, considerably less publicized, at least in the venues I frequent. I admit to coming late to this party: two of my favorite bloggers, Ken at Popehat and Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms, have already weighed in on this. And I agree with them both, so there’s not a lot of new argumentation here… I just think it’s important that I should talk about this.

It seems that Chick-fil-A wants to expand into Boston, and Mayor Thomas M. Menino isn’t having any of it:

Chick-fil-A doesn’t belong in Boston. You can’t have a business in the city of Boston that discriminates against a population. We’re an open city, we’re a city that’s at the forefront of inclusion.

That’s the Freedom Trail. That’s where it all started right here. And we’re not going to have a company, Chick-fil-A or whatever the hell the name is, on our Freedom Trail.

Typical politician’s bluster, right? Well, actually, no. Menino then goes Full Blagojevich in terms of self-importance: “If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult—unless they open up their policies.”

Yeah, well, no. When Northeastern students kept Chick-fil-A off their campus, they did so by convincing their administration that the chicken chain’s “charitable” contributions run counter to the goals of the university (including, one surmises, a lack of on-campus disturbances). But that’s a citizen protest affecting a private university’s decisions. I have no problems with that: indeed, I endorse it. When Menino stopped Wal-Mart from moving into Roxbury, the opposition was crafted in terms of Wal-Mart’s actual corporate culture. This is shaky ground, but at least reasonable.

Threatening to withhold licensing on the basis of what the corporation does with its charities, absent any evidence of criminal discrimination towards gay employees or customers, however, is no different than, in another jurisdiction, withholding a building permit for a mosque because the mayor doesn’t like Muslims.

Ken pretty well nails it:

I haven't seen any evidence that Chick-Fil-A discriminates in hiring or service. Rather, they give money to a cause I despise, one that promotes social discrimination. But the government doesn't get to pick and choose what social causes are permissible, and any government actor who aspires to that power is a lowlife thug. What's particularly alarming about Menino’s thuggery is how openly his referencing to licensing “difficulties” reveals how things really work in government: whatever rights you think that you have, practically speaking some bureaucrat can punish you for exercising them on a whim, and there's very little you can do about it. Menino represents the ethos of government actors who think quite frankly that this is right and just and how it should be—that they, our masters, should be able to dictate what we think and do and say if we want to do business in their fiefdom.

Menino could use his bully pulpit to call on Bostonians to reject Chick-Fil-A if they come to town. He could call for social opprobrium on Chick-Fil-A and its affiliates and even on its patrons. He could organize protests and marches and letter-writing campaigns. He could carry a sign in front of Chick-Fil-A saying “BE LES BIGOT” if it opens. [I love this, by the way.] But if he says he’ll use the coercive power of government to retaliate against Chick-Fil-A for views he doesn’t like, he’s totalitarian. If you support him because you agree with him (and with me) that Chick-Fil-A’s stance on gays is worthy of condemnation, then you’re a damned fool, and don’t let me catch you whining if some other government actor retaliates against an individual or business because of a political stance you like.

Ken is more libertarian than I, and his anathema to government intrusion is therefore more foregrounded. But Menino’s belief that he has the right to keep Chick-fil-A out not because they’re predatory and exploitative (cf., Walmart) but because he doesn’t like the CEO’s socio-politics? What’s next? Denying a license to a grocery store because they plan to sell products made by companies owned by the Koch brothers? I’m with Ken.

I’m reminded of the time I met Harland Sanders, legendary founder of Chick-fil-A’s competitor, KFC. It took him 15 seconds to prove to me that he was the most smug and self-satisfied racist I’ve ever encountered face to face. What Sanders was to race, Cathy is to sexual orientation. I’m not going to buy a whole lot of their respective products [yes, I know, Sanders is long deceased and sold the company before his death]… but partly that’s because there’s a Raising Cane’s practically right across the street from my office. Love me some chicken fingers.