Chick-fil-A finally waves the white flag

They don't want to discuss it, but Chick-fil-A has decided to stop making political contributions and instead to restrict its charitable giving to less controversial causes.

This is a very bad thing, not because Dan Cathy doesn't have the right to do what he wants with his own money, but because everyone knows that it's a response to the blowback he's gotten for his opposition to marriage redefinition.

There was even a failed boycott, complete with a gay "kiss-in" at several locations, to intimidate Mr. Cathy into no longer supporting causes the authoritarian left disapproves of. It didn't work. In fact, Americans who believe in free speech (regardless of their position on gay marriage) not only staged an "appreciation day" which had crowds lined up around the block at Chick-fil-A's all over America but have made it a point to eat there more often than they might have otherwise as their way of protesting the left's arrogant conviction that to disagree with them is to be evil and that punishment must be meted out, up to and including destruction.

Gay marriage wasn't the issue. The issue was whether Americans were going to tolerate being told that they not only must think what the woke folk tell them to think but that they must not patronize businesses whose owners are guilty of thought crime.

For the most part, we weren't.

Two cities- Chicago and Boston- actually stopped Chick-fil-A from opening restaurants within their city limits for a while because Dan Cathy believed that redefining marriage to include same-sex couples was bad public policy. I remember somebody- I don't recall who just now- giving Mitt Romney the very good advice to call a press conference on the subject and to conduct it while eating a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, the profits from which are often contributed to various left-wing causes, in order to make the point that conservatives (at least as conservatism was defined before Donald Trump) believe in using arguments rather than economic intimidation in order to bring people around to their point of view.

But now, it's over. Quietly, with a whimper rather than a bang, Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A have raised the white flag. In one sense, you can hardly blame him; he's in the business of making chicken sandwiches, after all, and not political statements. Putting his money where his conscience is has turned out to be bad for business.

But free speech is the loser. So is the cause of civil conversation between Americans who disagree with one another.

As somebody observed earlier today, at least now we can have what appeals to us for lunch without feeling the necessity of making a political statement. But unfortunately, we are still going to have the opinions of the social left and "cancel culture" shoved down our throats, and the precedent that had made the point that Americans are not going to be bullied into boycotting businesses based on the politics of their owners has fallen by the wayside.

Score one more for the authoritarians in their ongoing contest with the First Amendment.