Notice the propagandistic media messaging: failing to affirm LGBTQ means you are 'anti-LGBTQ' (CBS News screenshot)

Sometimes a delicious chicken sandwich is just a delicious chicken sandwich. But in the case of Chick-fil-A’s capitulation to the progressive left, it matters precisely because whether it wanted to be or not, the fast-food giant became a massive culture war symbol.

I can well imagine that its corporate leadership just wanted to be done with all the hassle, and stick with selling grub, like all other fast food chains. Who can blame them? Chick-fil-A didn’t invite these years of disgusting, lying smears … but it handled them with grace, and kept on standing by its principles. People who patronized Chick-fil-A knew that the allegations were baseless, and that hating Chick-fil-A was a left-wing cult thing to do. Remember this crackpot New Yorker article from 2018, in which the writer freaked out about Chick-fil-A coming to New York City? Excerpt:

Defenders of Chick-fil-A point out that the company donates thousands of pounds of food to New York Common Pantry, and that its expansion creates jobs. The more fatalistic will add that hypocrisy is baked, or fried, into every consumer experience—that unbridled corporate power makes it impossible to bring your wallet in line with your morals. Still, there’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety.

Ewwww, suburban piety! That writer, Dan Piepenbring, lives in Brooklyn, according to the New Yorker. His piece was the epitome of a certain kind of puritanical preciousness we’ve come to expect from progressives. The fact that Chick-fil-A withstood this kind of garbage, and kept right on supporting its charities, brought the company a lot of admiration from pious suburbanites.

My wife and kids love Chick-fil-A, but I don’t go to it that often, because I’m not big on fried chicken. Still, it has been one of my favorite brands, in large part because it has succeeded smashingly — it is now the third-largest fast food retailer in the US — despite being the object of so much progressive hatred. Chick-fil-A showed that you could be faithful to traditional Christian values, and despite the scorn of the hateful Left, still succeed economically. The kind of people who write for The New Yorker might despise you, but the marketplace rewarded you for the good chicken and waffle fries you provided, and didn’t buy the smear that you are a hateful company.

For a lot of us, Chick-fil-A’s quiet, cheerful resistance was a model of how to hold on to your Christian values, in spite of progressive spite, and still succeed. Quality work and a good product will always win out, even over left-wing prejudice. It was possible to look at Chick-fil-A and draw that conclusion … until today.

It is no doubt true that Chick-fil-A’s stance, however unfairly characterized by LGBT activists and their allies, was hurting its ability to expand into the European market, and into more liberal markets in the US. But good grief, how much money does Chick-fil-A need to make, anyway? Last year, it took almost four KFC stores to make as much money as a single Chick-fil-A outlet. If Chick-fil-A was suffering from a decline in business because of its corporate charitable giving, their move could be understandable. But this is a fabulously successful chain!

Only the company’s top decision-makers know why they did what they did, but I would bet money that this was not about markets, but about its executive leadership class getting tired of them and their spouses being stink-eyed by fellow rich and upper middle class peers at social gatherings. One of the most absurd shibboleths of American life is that business executives only care about the bottom line, and ultimately make decisions based only on profit and loss. In fact, these decisions are often driven by a sense of idealism. It might be mistaken idealism, but it’s still idealism. All of us want to be liked and admired by our peers. It’s only human. Never, ever underestimate how much it matters to elites to be thought well of by their own social class. Their social class now reveres LGBTs; this requires it to despise Christians and others whose beliefs, for whatever reason, fail the progressive purity test.

This is not news. Almost every day I hear from readers — in academia, in the corporate world, even in churches — who talk about the growing sense of menace in their workplaces from political correctness. More and more people are coming to understand that the Law of Merited Impossibility (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”) really does describe an actual dynamic in American life when it comes to LGBT issues. For many conservative Christians, Chick-fil-A’s refusal to kowtow to the woke commissars was an inspiration. It was a small thing, maybe, but at least there was some major corporation that didn’t allow itself to be pushed around by these bullies.

And now that’s gone. The progressives took the biggest culture-war scalp of all today. Chick-fil-A is a privately held company, so it wasn’t facing a stockholder rebellion. It is growing extremely fast, and doing very well, even in a time when Americans have come to favor gay marriage and gay rights. If Chick-fil-A really had been guilty of the hatefulness its accusers claimed, it would have seen its business decline as LGBT rights became more popular. In fact, it has seen nothing but growth.

But by abandoning the Salvation Army and other charities, Chick-fil-A’s corporate leadership signaled that it accepts the Left’s critique. The company is trying to dodge this charge, saying that it is merely refocusing its charitable giving priorities, to focus on education, fighting hunger, and fighting homelessness. The Salvation Army doesn’t have anything to do with education, but you will find no more effective and valiant fighters of hunger and homelessness than the faithful of the Salvation Army.

But those good men and women are not good enough for Chick-fil-A now. Chick-fil-A is embarrassed by them. If Chick-fil-A’s executives think they’re going to get a fair shake from progressives now, well, they’re going to learn otherwise — and they’re going to deserve what they get. Chick-fil-A is going to have to start paying de facto reparations to LGBT organizations in order to buy goodwill. They’ll do it, too, because they have already demonstrated that they can be pushed around.

Symbolically, this is a big deal for those who hold to what Christianity, Judaism, and Islam traditionally teach about homosexuality and related phenomena. It sends the signal that resistance is futile. If even Chick-fil-A — the company that takes its Christian values so seriously that it closes on Sunday, and despite that revenue loss, was still able to become the third-biggest fast food franchise in America — if even Chick-fil-A capitulates to the illiberal demands of LGBT activists, then what chance do you have in professional life, you and your religion, despised by power elites?

Progressives and LGBT activists have every reason to gloat today. By making Chick-fil-A surrender, they have demonstrated their power — and their illiberalism. If you think compromise is possible with these progressives, you are lying to yourself. They will not be happy until you and everyone like you are driven to the margins of public life — and even then, that won’t be enough for some of them. Understand that the real currency here is not money; it’s middle-class respectability. That will be denied to Christians who remain faithful to Biblical teachings on sex and sexuality. You had better get that learned right now, Christian. You aren’t going to be able to hide. You might be able to make a good living in your field — Chick-fil-A certainly has been — but you will always be an outsider.

Can you live with that? You had better be able to. As I wrote in The Benedict Option: