God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy

by Mike Huckabee

  Importantly, this was intended not as a protest against same-sex marriage but as an affirmation for a chicken sandwich company’s executives to enjoy the same rights of free speech as have been afforded to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple; Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks; Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon; and others who’ve been as outspoken for same-sex marriage as Dan Cathy has been against it. To emphasize the double standard even more, it might be noted that Apple, Starbucks, and Amazon are all publicly held companies, while Chick-fil-A is a private company.

  With the date of August 1 just a couple of weeks away, I shared the plan with several other key political and faith leaders, requesting that they ask their constituents to simply show up at a nearby Chick-fil-A on August 1 and buy a sandwich in appreciation for their food and service and to quietly take a stand for their executives to have the same right of free speech as Cook, Schultz, Bezos, and others. We urged “don’t carry signs, don’t scream or argue. Just enjoy a sandwich and say thanks.”

  What happened on August 1 was nothing short of historic. We knew something was surely brewing because my Facebook page “blowed up,” as we say in the South. It must have spooked the Facebook censors, because they blocked my Facebook event page for over twenty-four hours, leaving people unable to “sign up” and indicate they were “going.” Not one dime was spent promoting the day. No high-dollar New York PR firm guided the process or advised it. There was no budget, no staff, and no formal organization. The entire effort was completely organic and self-igniting. I talked about it on my daily radio show and mentioned it briefly the next two Saturdays on my Fox News Channel show. I shared it on social media like Facebook and Twitter and urged others to do the same, and they did. Not a bit of coordination or even communication of any kind occurred with the people at Chick-fil-A. There must have been people who assumed the executives at CFA had suggested it, helped promote it, or encouraged it. None of the above. I’m not even sure the corporate office approved it or wanted me to do it. I never asked them. (For the record, I didn’t hear from them or have any contact with them before, during, or after the event. To those who might surmise that I got a “free Chick-fil-A for life” card, you would be quite wrong!)

  At this point, for me, it was not about what Dan Cathy said. It was about whether America was now going to have two completely different sets of rules: one for those who would be free to speak with ridicule and contempt toward those with a Christian worldview, and then a very different standard for people of faith, who could be told, “Sit down, shut up, and go away—or else!” I felt that if such hatred for religious liberty and the people who believed in it and practiced it went unchallenged, then people of faith would have no one to blame but themselves for losing every last vestige of freedom. The left seems intent on shutting down any viewpoint that differs from theirs. Ironically, this is done in the name of “tolerance” and “diversity” when the left has zero tolerance for a different point of view. With the left, “diversity” means “uniformity.” (I’ll cover this more fully in Chapter 3.)

  Facebook apparently was inundated with screams from the left when the event page went viral. Their initial explanation for blocking the page was that someone had complained about the content. When we pointed out that the content related only to people eating chicken sandwiches, they must have realized they could hardly classify that as “offensive” (except to chickens), so then they claimed there had been some mistake and it would be back up soon. This apparent attempt to quash the momentum probably stirred it up even more, fueling the outrage from people in “flyover land” who were up to their necks in disgust and were ready to do something.

  I had already decided to take an early-morning drive on Wednesday, August 1, to the Chick-fil-A restaurant closest to my house, about twenty miles away. I got there at 7 a.m. and people were already getting in line. Cars had started coming and never let up. Even though the stores had reportedly stocked more food than normal and expected an uptick in business, no one could have predicted the groundswell nationwide as millions of Americans waited patiently in line, in their cars, and on foot, simply to buy a sandwich to show support for a fellow American who had dared to voice his own opinion. Every national news network was forced to cover the event, as it blocked traffic around the stores in most cities. Most fascinating was that the response in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago and other major urban areas was equal to that of the communities in the Bible Belt. Skeptics had predicted a barely appreciable increase in the consumption of chicken sandwiches that day—an embarrassment not just for the Chick-fil-A stores but especially for the people like me who had urged our fellow citizens to take a stand.

  The results were quite different. Many of the local restaurants completely ran out of food by mid-to-late afternoon, but people continued to arrive, some purchasing whatever the store had left or even buying gift certificates to come back on another day. There were hundreds of heartwarming stories flowing to my Web site and Facebook page of customers showing their kindness and courtesy despite long lines. In Des Moines, Iowa, a police officer on his lunch break was passed through the line to the front so he would be able to get his food within his limited lunch break time. Others sang hymns, visited with those around them, and made new friends. Some, as an act of “paying it forward,” purchased the food for the customer behind them. There was no violence, no screaming or profanity, and no reports of “sandwich rage” from people having to wait up to three hours in line to get a piece of chicken on a bun. Some churches (including my own) bought a large number of sandwiches and took them to a local homeless shelter.

  There were almost 19 million visits to my Facebook page during the process, and over 600,000 signed up to “attend” just on my event page alone—not to mention the hundreds if not thousands of other similar pages created by churches, organizations, and individuals. For just that one day, sales at many Chick-fil-A locations increased by 200 percent or more beyond their best-ever performance, and the 2012 sales increased by over 12 percent for the year, with most analysts attributing the dramatic sales jump to the August 1 “Appreciation Day.” When I visited their communities in the months following the event, many local franchisees told me that not only did they have record sales that day beyond anything they’d ever had, but that overall sales had gone up and stayed up from that day forward.

  I would be asked numerous times in the following weeks why there was such a strong outpouring of response. My answer would always be the same: Frustration for many people in the heartland of America had reached a tipping point. Those who lived their lives quietly and without a lot of confrontation had been pushed to the limit by those who angrily shouted them down as “haters” simply because they held to biblical standards on issues like marriage and the sanctity of life. Their values were mocked, sneered at, and distorted by the entertainment elites from Hollywood and New York and from the political ruling class in Washington.

  These are not the kind of people who burn tires in the street, paint graffiti on bridges or buildings, camp out to protest in front of businesses, throw paint on people, walk naked down Main Street (Thank God!), or chain themselves to furniture in government office buildings. They’re people who get up early most days and make a lunch for their kids before they catch the bus for school; they come home tired at the end of the day from a hard day’s work; they mow their own lawns, watch their kids perform in music recitals and church pageants, and attend their children’s baseball and soccer games. They pay their taxes on time and typically give generously to their church and to charities. They are believers—in God, or at the very least the sacred concept of religious freedom. They really don’t want much from the government other than to be left alone. When they do want something from the government, it’s simple stuff: getting the trash picked up on time, having a policeman show up promptly if their house is being broken into, seeing the potholes fixed, and little things like keeping terrorists from walking right over the borders and into the country. And for that, they’re treated as if they’
re uninformed and unscientific backwater buffoons, lacking in the “hipness” factor and living in a world that ended with the last episode of Leave It to Beaver. (Why, I’ll bet some of them even wash their hands before dinner and think Russia is still a threat! What rubes.)

  And on August 1, 2012, they decided to show up and eat a chicken sandwich.

  One missed opportunity on that day was the public position of Mitt Romney, who by then was the Republican nominee for President. He apparently took the advice of his Boston-based campaign brain trust and declined to weigh in on the issue at all. When asked about the huge turnout around the nation, he simply said, “Those are not things […] that’s not part of my campaign” [Washington Examiner, Romney: “Chick-fil-A Controversy Not Part of My Campaign,” August 3, 2012]. And I believe that across America, many who would have been enthusiastic Romney voters were saying, “Then his campaign is not my campaign.” I continued to support Mitt and vigorously campaign for him right up until Election Day, because I think he would have been a great President who’d have made major corrections to the direction we’d been going for four years. Though we were opponents in 2008, I believe him to be a good man with impeccable integrity in his personal and business life. There is no finer model of kindness and commitment than Mitt and his family. But I heard repeatedly from voters that it would have been nice for someone in the Romney campaign to simply say, “It’s always good to see Americans stand for free speech.” For many voters looking for someone to take a stand for them and speak a word of affirmation, it was curtains down and lights out.

  That many would-be supporters cooled off at that point was unfair, as I give credit to Mitt for being a tireless campaigner and running a very disciplined and focused campaign. I feel that voters should rarely give up on a candidate over one comment or action. I will always believe that Mitt, a man of strong faith himself, was probably blindsided by the question and not aware of what a landmark event that day was for many values voters. Still, little crumbs from the table sometimes satisfy the hungry birds, and for this “take a stand moment,” the birds got nary a crumb.

  Speaking of birds, thanks should be given to the vast numbers of yardbirds (i.e., chickens, but it also means city folks who’ve never seen a chicken in their yards) who’d sacrificed their lives like turkeys on Thanksgiving to handle those hungry crowds—crowds that quickly dispelled the notion that only those in favor of redefining marriage were willing to take a stand. The idea that a person expressing views that are quite ordinary and common among evangelical Christians, Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and, for that matter, Muslims, would be excoriated by the press and, more significantly, by government was a bridge too far. Most people of faith are nice people. They don’t typically want to scream, carry signs, march in a protest, or shake their fists in public.

  (There are exceptions, to be sure—some of the meanest people I’ve ever known were “church people.” And, truth be told, a lot of Christians like to do their fussing and cussing as “prayer requests,” as in, “We need to pray for Robert; he is drinking again and Martha is going to divorce him if he doesn’t get out of rehab all dried out.” But I digress.)

  But believers do have a sense of justice and understand the difference between right and wrong. And watching a fellow believer being threatened, abused, and trampled by a loud, intolerant minority of same-sex marriage advocates was not something they could sit on the sidelines for. We simply asked them to stand up for the right of free speech and the opportunity to express a viewpoint without threats of retaliation from those who had a different opinion. For most Americans, “free speech” means we’d welcome more voices into the mix, not try to silence the ones that didn’t scream the loudest. Surely it would shock the Founders to think that the First Amendment—a legacy they risked their lives for—would one day be subverted in order to close the marketplace of ideas to those unsanctioned by the elite ruling class.

  It was a seminal moment for many faith-friendly people across America. All those people in line for a chicken sandwich looked around and, for the first time in a long time, didn’t feel alone. The power of that was palpable. A feeling of courage welled up within us. The faith community, like the conservative political movement, is often divided, but the act of sharing a Chick-fil-A sandwich with millions of others was comforting and reassuring to us that we could stand as one.

  On the other hand, many who stood in line for hours that day would later be disappointed to learn that their overwhelming outpouring of support for Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A was seemingly spurned. Eighteen months later, in a March 2014 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, Cathy said he regretted his 2012 comments about same-sex marriage but claimed to still hold his beliefs personally. In a subsequent article in National Journal, the headline screamed, “Conservatives’ Favorite Chicken Wants Out of the Culture Wars.” The tone of the article implied that Cathy had raised the white flag of surrender. “Consumers want to do business with brands that they can interface with, that they can relate with,” he was quoted as saying. “And it’s probably very wise from our standpoint to make sure that we present our brand in a compelling way that the consumer can relate to.”

  My inbox was quickly stuffed with emails from disappointed and dispirited people who felt that Chick-fil-A had caved—that they’d gone the way of most major American companies and acquiesced to the public pressure to either be supportive of same-sex marriage or at least remain silent about it. Ironically, the throngs of people who had filled Chick-fil-A’s stores and cash registers had done so to encourage people of faith to resist that very pressure, and to defend them from it. The “I wouldn’t do that again” comment from Dan Cathy was a gut punch to many of those hardworking and God-fearing Americans who had hoped to see someone in the corporate world refuse to sit down and shut up when it came to their most heartfelt beliefs. For many who had stood for free speech in showing appreciation for Chick-fil-A, it seemed that the company was choosing to abandon them and opt for “no speech.” For them, silence wasn’t golden.

  It was a completely different story for the Green family of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, who own the family-held company Hobby Lobby. When Obamacare was passed, a provision would have forced companies to provide twenty different methods of birth control, four of which were abortifacient, meaning that the effect of them pharmaceutically was to end the life of a post-fertilized egg in the womb. The Green family is a devout and very committed Christian family, who, like Chick-Fil-A, close their stores on Sunday and are known for their philanthropic endeavors for many Christian causes. They already provided a very generous health insurance plan for their 13,000-plus employees, and were willing to fund sixteen of the twenty drugs mandated by Obamacare. They were not willing to provide those that constituted a medicinal abortion and asked for a waiver from the Obama administration. It seemed like an easy ask, since over forty exemptions had been meted out to unions and other big businesses that were pals of the President when they had asked for them. But in the Hobby Lobby case, the government said no. The decision was effectively to tell the Green family that it was fine for them to believe, but their religious convictions were limited to the government’s tolerance. The ruling was a shock to people of faith across America. Hobby Lobby sued, and the case wound through the lower courts, making its way eventually to the Supreme Court. In June 2014, the Supremes ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby. Had the Green family lost, they would have been subject to fines of up to a $1.5 million a day. It would have put them out of business. The government expected that the threat of bankruptcy would cause them to fold. They greatly underestimated the authenticity of the Green family and the fact that their convictions were not for sale, rent, or surrender. It was indeed a “teachable moment,” in a profile of courage. Christians across America cheered for a corporation which put Christ above cash.

  Another very public dust-up in the culture clash involved the runaway hit reality show Duck Dynasty, which (for the uninitiated) followed an eccentric Lo
uisiana family as they shared their lives hunting, fishing, making game calls, and just living day-to-day in a small northern Louisiana town where going to church is not considered radical. A firestorm erupted in December 2013 when Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson was quoted defending traditional marriage, albeit in graphic terms. Duck Dynasty—a certified money machine for A&E—was promptly and publicly dumped by the network after complaints from gay rights organizations. The network officially said it was “suspending” Phil from the show, but the family quickly made it clear that “If Papa is out, we’re all out.” It was apparent that A&E wasn’t used to dealing with people for whom family was more valuable than money.

  This conflict isn’t just a matter of faith—it’s a matter of class. During the 2008 election cycle, the serial adulterer, notorious liar, and all-round con man John Edwards spoke convincingly of “Two Americas,” in which one America was blessed with prosperity, opportunity, and plenty while the other America was a land of poverty, need, and hopelessness. Edwards and I would certainly disagree as to the remedies for this problem, but he did describe it well, despite the scorn he got from some of the finer tables at Republican gatherings, where they couldn’t imagine anyone actually living in poverty in the United States. They certainly didn’t know anyone like that, not personally. Their seeming indifference to the struggling class had far more to do with why Republicans lost elections than did awkward, inopportune, or even indefensible comments from candidates.