Months after sparking a national wave of protest in the GLBT community, fast food chain Chick-fil-A has underwritten a gold event that benefits an anti-gay group, On Top Magazine reported on July 25. Last February, the eatery chain sponsored a seminar on heterosexual marriage titled "The Art of Marriage" organized by anti-gay group the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which opposes legal equality fo
r same-sex couples in that state. "Chick-fil-A is one of the only large American companies (Domino Pizza under Tom Monaghan was another) with conservative Christianity an integral part of its corporate culture," noted a Jan. 31 EDGE article. After the company’s sponsorship of the marriage seminar, the EDGE article noted, "it has come to light about Chick-fil-A has been using corporate coffers to support other ultra-religious right and anti-gay marriage groups. Gay blog Good As You did some sleuthing and found the company was the mainstay behind the WinShape Foundation, which is solely funded by Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy’s family. "The foundation supports college students who espouse a fundamentalist Christian lifestyle (forget Jews or Muslims; Episcopalians need not apply)," the article added. Good As You also reported that the WinShape Foundation is Chick-fil-A’s charity, and that it had aligned itself with the Ruth Institute, which is affiliated with anti-gay group the National Organization for Marriage, a chief player in both the campaign to pass Proposition 8 in California in 2008 and, a year later, another successful anti-gay effort in Maine to repeal a state law extending marriage equality at the ballot box before that law could take effect. You might know Ruth’s visible head, Jennifer Roback Morse, who we’ve featured on here a number of times. She’s also the one who caught national headlines recently when she talked about wearing a rainbow scarf (that wasn’t really rainbow) to the Prop 8 trial as a way of reclaiming the rainbow from the gay rights movement."
