Multiple sources reported yesterday that Don Perry, leading spokesperson for Chick-fil-A, died suddenly of a heart attack.
Given the explicit and prominent role this organization and its leadership (including Mr. Perry) have given to their extremely conservative Southern Baptist religious beliefs, is it unreasonable to ask whether perhaps the God they worship has spoken?
RIP, Don Perry.
Please share widely!
but yes people from that corner of Christianity have an awful lot of certainty about what God is and is not saying.
click here — if you promise not to be offended. Or at least to remember that I did not make it up.
Happy days.
Yeah and Scalia thinks we all have a 2nd Amendment right to rocket launchers for Christsakes.
Herman Cain for the position
Chick-fil-A certainly needs a “hip-hop makeover”.
and pilferer of the tip jar.
this was surely a stressful time for him, and it shouldn’t have been. There should be nothing stressful about having traditional values. It’s young radicals who want to overthrow traditional values who ought to be stressed out by their work, not poor old guys just following the same traditions as their grandfathers.
adhering to all those extremely conservative Baptist religious beliefs, right? I think we can all agree on that, yes? Of course.
Don’t see that now-a-days. He must have a good boss to stay with a company for that long.
So the guy supported the biblical definition of marriage, that reason for joy or celebration of his passing?
I am quite serious. I don’t understand how this is defined in some final way in Christian scripture. One could go the other way and say that the Biblical definition of marriage is as follows:
Humor aside, I simply don’t understand how your typical Baptist answers this question and why so much of the above is “wrong”. Are some parts of Scripture more scriptury than other parts? How can we tell which is which?
sorry kbusch there’s no cliffs notes, there’s no link to settle it. danfromwaltham isn’t wrong, everyone knows that “biblical definition of marriage” means “not two dudes or two women” only pedants make a stink and care where what version of what book says that.
after such a self-refuting reply: there’s nothing that says it’s true, but we just know it’s true and that’s good enough for us!
And how do you know Galileo was wrong? Isn’t Biblical astronomy decidedly earth-centered? If you do side with Galileo, how do you know that your other deductions (without Cliff Notes, i.e., direct evidence) are true?
The modest man would man would say he doesn’t. In your case–
Eve is likewise defined as Adam’s helper.
Frankly, this is an appallingly regressive way to define marriage. I would strongly counsel any female friend or relative entering into such a marriage to back out immediately — and so probably would you and anyone else who contributes to BMG. Who wants this morally regressive style of marriage? Anyone?
Someday marriage will be healed and people will be able to marry again. Until then, I agree, I strongly counsel everyone not to marry, especially men.
Howard, we love you. You are sui generis, my friend.
of a gold watch.
We should never wish death on anyone, especially over a disagreement and this guy might just have really liked the company, as many of the owners and employees do since it is a good company doing good work led by a nominally good man with the terrible opinions. That is all folks. Wishing death on opponents, and Gods wrath, and organizing muzzling boycotts, and generating false controversies, and using the state as a weapon in the culture war are all trademarks of the religious right. The equality movement and some progressives have done our side a disservice with this controversy.
Nothing Cathy said is any different from what his denomination preaches. You disagree with his definition than don’t join his Church, no need to demonize him for his personal religious beliefs. Where he was completly and utterly wrong is saying the civil rights of gays through civil marriage are a threat to his personal faith, and we must be very clear that we are not redefining the Christian understanding of marriage, we are simply allowing gays to have equal protection under the law and the Constitution, which last I checked made no mention of a higher power. Thats the bargain we make with the Cathys of the world-you don’t like gays getting married than you don’t have to attend their weddings.
Case in point: my evangelical brother was up in arms over the Goodridge decision ten years ago and now could care less what the state does, so long as his church is free to defend its internal traditions-and that’s the best we are going to get from him and the Cathy’s of the world. The boycott and the Menino and Emmanuel threats muzzle speech and suppress the discussion and prevent the dialogue we want and actually plays into the rights narrative that gay marriage will threaten churches and is being shoved down the throats of religious Americans. Already Huckabee and Palin have mined political gold off this. I strongly disagree with Cathy’s politics and his interpretation of our faith, but we can’t win over converts with these tactics. At the end of the day we need to convince the Cathys that their beliefs are not affected by allowing gay marriage, that it’s the best way to let everyone leave everyone else alone which goes to the heart of how America should work.
IIRC, Voltaire was said to have died particularly painfully. The religious, at the time, attributed this to the Hand of God. Attributing things to the HoG often serves an ideological purpose. Had the sudden death happened to Mayors Emanuel or Menino, not doubt one of Cathy’s coreligionists would see this as God expressing His preferences in our debate on gay rights.
So SomervilleTom is not expressing a desire that anyone die, so much as musing about how tragedies get interpreted by the Presumption Chorus of right-wing Christianity.
I wrote nothing — absolutely nothing — that can be construed as wishing death on anyone, nor as celebrating Mr. Perry’s demise.
As I think you know, my family of origin was “extremely conservative Southern Baptist” in its religious beliefs and I was “encouraged” (dragged kicking and screaming, actually) to attend Sunday School and Church every week.
I am quite certain that, in that congregation at that time, had a similarly prominent leader in some “secular humanist atheist” organization met a similar end, our preacher would have been pounding the lectern all morning to make sure we all got God’s message. He would no doubt have also prayed loudly for the salvation of the soul of this sinner during the half-hour morning prayer.
I’m not sure you’ve ever been to a Sunday Morning worship service of the Southern Baptist convention in a Maryland suburb of Washington DC — plenty close enough to the deep south to resonate with its religious beliefs. I’m reasonably certain you haven’t done that in the early 1960s (since you probably weren’t born then).
As you observe, it is the extreme right who has chosen to prominently display its religious beliefs and prejudices into our national life. As someone who may have more familiarity with the peculiarities of those beliefs and prejudices than you, I would like to suggest that it is not out of line to observe when those beliefs are picked and chosen to support their political agenda.
Pat Robertson wasted no time in announcing that Hurricane Katrina was a message from God, as did Hal Lindsey and Charles Colson. Dan Cathy chose to affiliate with this religious tradition, and chose to make that affiliation a highly-public aspect of his very secular business.
I think that makes questions like I asked (“Message from God?”) perfectly legitimate — as legitimate as asking whether a politician who purports to be a strong Catholic can nevertheless support pro-choice legislation.
If religious institutions insist that Government allow their beliefs to trump national law, then is it really in “poor taste” to observe when those same institutions ignore those beliefs?
My entire point is we should be better than them, and funny that Kbush mentions Voltaire, since it was he who said “I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it”. The only pro-gay rights politician who has made any sense on this issue is Bloomberg. I agree with you that the first thing they would be doing is praising the death of someone they disagreed with it, but to me the cheeky and sarcastic question is disrespectful to a man, who for all we know, might have been pro-gay rights. We have no idea how he related to this controversy. The best thing McCain ever said was calling Falwell an agent of intolerance, the HRC and Marriage Equality movement should not fight intolerance with more intolerance but show the other side that we are not a threat to their faith and there is a path to agree to disagree.
My brother comes from a far more conservative religious perspective than I do, closer to those Southern Baptists you mention than the relatively progressive Catholic communities I was raised and still find myself in. But while he is not in favor of gay marriage in MA, he isn’t against it either and he was saying what Cathy was ten years ago. Now he could care less about that issue, and most of the issues he is concerned about keep him a Democrat, but once the Cathy’s of the world discover that gay marriage doesn’t threaten their faith it will be a whole lot easier to get this passed. Marriage equality should be a non-partisan common sense idea, and I think it will be 10-15 years from now, but our side has to acknowledge they will always be folks who believe that ‘traditional marriage’ excludes gays, and the trick is to convince them that their beliefs and traditions will not be threatened by this change, and failing to make this change does threaten the lives of their countrymen. That’s where we can be headed. We should educate not threaten or demand punishment, divine or otherwise, on our opponents since we are more rational than they are.
You can lecture us after you address this line:
+++
You wrote “We should never wish death on anyone, …”
I didn’t do that, and I think it’s in poor taste for you to suggest that I did.
I also didn’t write anything about the organization’s beliefs about gay marriage. My comment was focused instead on their professed beliefs about the nature of God. I certainly didn’t “threaten”, “demand punishment”, or anything of the sort. To the contrary, I offered what I think is a perfectly reasonable observation that they seem to profess these beliefs only when the “signs” they see point in whatever direction they’ve already staked out.
My comment is about the way they seem to claim the mantle of God when it suits their political purposes — the gay marriage agenda is your own.
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Probably not:
Doesnt change that this was his philosophy and liberals should never abandon it. Tom you and I both know you were cheekily aping what Falwell would have said had a gay CEO died and you admitted as much and I think that does trivialize a death and even if it’s was mockin mimicry ther tactics should be condemned a never emulated. I do apologize for suggesting you were serious and your intentions were anything but satirical, but in my view those men did commit an evil, Cathy unknowingly perpetuates the same evil and it’s this kind of charged with us or against us rhetoric that has made this straightforward issue so difficult to discuss, with nearly all of the blame going in the other direction but the cause should make allies not enemies and should respond with love and not hatred.