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Chick-Fil-A’s First UK Location Announces Closing One Week After Opening

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After a massive backlash, the anti-LGBTQ fast food restaurant’s landlord in Reading, England decided not to renew Chick-Fil-A’s lease. They’ll be out of there in six months.

Well… that didn’t take long. Chick-Fil-A only opened its first store in the United Kingdom less than two weeks ago, and they have already announced its closing. And it’s all because of the UK’s strong LGBTQ community. Ah, victory is sweet.

What actually happened started before the location even opened, when the very news of a Chick-Fil-A coming to the UK was greeted with outrage and hostility from LGBTQ rights advocates in Reading, England. Before it even opened, they called for a boycott, and much of the coverage from UK press centered around the notorious chicken chain’s continued support of anti-LGBTQ organizations.

“Chick-Fil-A is coming with fried chicken sandwiches and retrograde politics,” announced Eater London’s article about the chain’s plans to open a location in the UK. Meanwhile, in Reading, public opinion was sharply divided around the idea of a Chick-Fil-A coming to the area. In that way, it wasn’t too different than any American comments section’s response to any mention of the restaurant.

However, there was a difference in how Chick-Fil-A was received by owners of The Oracle shopping center in Reading, which houses the Chick-Fil-A in question. Once the controversy started up, they were quick to distance themselves, and made clear they would not be renewing Chick-Fil-A’s lease.

“We always look to introduce new concepts for our customers,” said an Oracle spokesperson, according to the BBC. “However, we have decided on this occasion that the right thing to do is to only allow Chick-fil-A to trade with us for the initial six-month pilot period, and not to extend the lease any further.”

According to Eater London’s initial coverage, Chick-Fil-A’s plan for the Reading location was to make it a one-year pop-up, expanding on the alleged success of four one-day pop-ups the chain held around the UK between 2016 and 2018. Therefore, The Oracle’s eviction notice may only bring a more abrupt end to an already-temporary UK location. It also doesn’t mean the chain won’t just find a more friendly landlord elsewhere in the country and re-open in a matter of months.

However, unlike here in the US, where Chick-Fil-A had already been a popular fast food franchise for decades before their anti-LGBTQ record was widely known, the restaurant’s controversial reputation has preceded them into the UK, and they may have a bigger struggle to establish themselves in that country than they’d expected. And that’s good news.

Photo via Reddit

Federal Judge Overturns ObamaCare’s Transgender Protections, Because Jesus

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The same judge who ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional has now ruled that religious freedom is more important than transgender people receiving medically necessary health care.

A U.S. District Court judge in Texas has overturned the protections written into ObamaCare for transgender people, ruling they violate the religious rights of healthcare providers who hold religious beliefs that oppose the existence of transgender people.

On Tuesday Judge Reed O’Connor, appointed by President George W. Bush, “vacated an Obama-era regulation that prohibited providers and insurers who receive federal money from denying treatment or coverage to anyone based on sex, gender identity, or termination of pregnancy,” The Hill reports.

That regulation also mandated healthcare providers perform medically necessary services for transgender patients.

O’Connor is known as the same federal judge who ruled the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional last year. According to The Hill, his ruling in this case is likely to be appealed.

The Trump administration is supporting a large group of Republican state attorneys general working to strip protections from people with pre-existing conditions, and ultimately, have ObamaCare voided by the courts.

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM

The Amazon Trail: Damned If I Know

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In this month’s Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch expresses the feelings of powerlessness and frustration the current Supreme Court wranglings over LGBTQ civil rights have inspired in many of us.

Damned if I know whether or not all the rabble rousing of the last sixty years has done us a lick of good. I thought the issue of our rights was pretty much settled, but on October 8, 2019, Stanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that gay employees are already protected from job discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964 federal civil rights law.

Some of the Justices seemed to believe that inclusion of sexual orientation in Title VII would have appeared preposterous to the court in 1964. Yet, Ms. Karlan argued, the Supreme Court has applied twenty-first century standards to a number of prior decisions. Discrimination against a person because of gender, she stated, already covers discrimination against sexual orientation. 

A woman who dates another woman and is fired for it, is the object of discrimination by the simple fact of her gender. A man will not be fired for dating a woman. The argument is plainspoken and ironclad. Some of the judges needed it repeated many times in many ways.

I’d been out four years by the time Title VII went into effect. The practice of favoring men over women was so blatantly wrong in my mind, I couldn’t believe a law was necessary. It certainly had nothing to do, in the late 1960s, with queer people keeping our jobs. You just shut up and stayed in your closet at work.

When I became a vocational counselor a few years later, my focus was on getting people employed, anywhere, anyhow. There was no question of finessing hires. Women became sewing machine operators at the clothing manufacturers of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Men delivered the raw materials, carted away the completed garments, and, for maybe ten cents an hour more, maintained the sewing machines. To have questioned the part I played in matching the unemployed to jobs by gender was to let my principles — and the law — come between desperate women, destitute men, and their survival. To invoke, or even be aware of, their newly stated rights, was irrelevant for most minimum wage workers.

Hearing Title VII invoked in defense of gay workers in 2019 was an eye opener. Ms. Karlan offered the Supremes, and Congress, an out. New, excruciatingly drawn-out legislation is not needed. If a man is fired because he loves another man, and a woman is not fired because she loves a man, then the original man was fired because he’s a man. Period.

These arguments come up, not because the fired individual is a bad employee, but because the employer has a prejudice, an historical, religious, or personal belief about gay people. In other words, because the employer has the power. Just like the women ruining their eyes and hands sewing, the men destroying their back and knees carting, the fired gay person is a victim of someone who has more power: in these cases, the employer.

The United States was not created to disenfranchise people, although we do a lousy job of respecting the rights of Native Americans and other people of color. When the worker is powerless, the employer can dictate who feeds their families and who doesn’t. Laws have always been bandied about, reinterpreted, applied rightly or wrongly, bent and ignored, depending on who is in power. 

And that’s where the activism of the last sixty years does make a lick of sense. We-the-people must stand against courts which would sustain the imbalance of power, and we must stand for the use of law to protect workers from prejudice, to protect veterans who live in the streets with their war nightmares, to protect women battered into submission by employers and partners, to protect queer people whose existence is an offense in the eyes of all-powerful beholders.

I no longer believe we can stop war, erase bigotry, take power and use it for only good. I no longer suit up with a wet bandana headband for tear gas, carry a rolled-up newspaper for protection, stay ever on the lookout for escape routes should the march, the rally, the sit-down, turn dangerous. I know now that the rabble-rousing must go on and on, if only to keep the lid on the inhumanity of humanity.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2019. Photos via Human Rights Campaign/Facebook

HUD Employees ‘Shell-Shocked’ After Ben Carson Makes Transphobic Remarks

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Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development has been making anti-LGBTQ remarks to HUD staff on a regular basis, according to a Washington Post report.

Secretary Ben Carson has been making vile, unprompted, transphobic remarks to Housing and Urban Development employees, some of whom were “shell-shocked” by the brain surgeon’s bigotry, according to a report published last Thursday in the Washington Post. Agency officials also say Carson repeatedly mocks transgender people.

Carson, who frequently presents himself as a deeply Christian man of faith, called transgender women “big, hairy men,” and claimed they are trying to access women’s homeless shelters to cause occupants harm.

“While visiting HUD’s San Francisco office this week, Carson also lamented that society no longer seemed to know the difference between men and women, two of the agency staffers said,” according to an extensive report in Thursday night’s Washington Post. “Carson’s remarks visibly shocked and upset many of the roughly 50 HUD staffers who attended Tuesday’s meeting, and prompted at least one woman to walk out in protest, the staffers said.”

Carson, during the San Francisco meeting, addressed HUD employees in “a rambling hour-long speech about HUD initiatives that they described as ‘stream of consciousness.’”

During that speech Carson said  “transgender people should get the same rights as everyone else, but they don’t get to change things for everybody else.” Those remarks echo ones he has made before.

He also told San Francisco HUD employees women’s shelters should turn away transgender women. One staffer told the Post, “this sounded like a slur to me.”

Carson’s talk became even more disturbing, two of the staffers said, when he started waxing nostalgic about the past when, in the words of one staffer, there were “just women and just men.” The HUD staffers said he sounded incredulous when he mentioned that people no longer know the difference between genders.

“His tone was kind of like ‘how crazy is that?’” another staffer said.

“For him to come to San Francisco and say this, it was unbelievable. People were just shell-shocked,” one staffer added.

One HUD official described Secretary Carson’s comments about transgender people as “dismissive and joking,” and called it “disrespectful of the people we are trying to serve.”

The Post’s lengthy report includes actions Carson has taken against transgender people during his tenure at HUD, and transphobic comments he has made in the past as well.

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Photo via NCRM

The Miseducation Of Richie Tozier

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The journey of a central character in It Chapter Two makes it one of the most uniquely empowering LGBTQ films of the year.

One of Stephen King’s most famous stories saw its newest film debut recently. Not only is It: Chapter Two (along with its predecessor, It) undeniably the best film adaptation of any of King’s works (sorry, fans of The Shining); part of what makes this retelling so particularly strong is the fact that director Andy Muschietti doesn’t just lean in to the human emotion — he dives headfirst.

Upfront trigger warning — Muschietti sets the tone at the start of the film with the first murder. 27 years later, Derry, Maine is the same small-minded town it always was. In this opening scene, a young gay couple is brutally beaten just outside the town fair, and one half of the couple is thrown over the bridge to hide the evidence. Naturally the town greeter, good ol’ Pennywise, is there to welcome him to your favorite New England getaway.

We don’t have enough time for me to go into exactly how much I genuinely loved this film. It currently has a 79 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the criticism it’s receiving is fair — although I disagree, especially about the time length. The overall aesthetic and narrative structure is a beautiful work of art. Director Andy Muschietti, who also directed Mama, is without question a newer director to keep an eye on.

But let’s cut to the chase. While the new adaptations have deviated in their own ways from both the book and the original 1990 miniseries starring national treasure Tim Curry and the late John Ritter, some changes have been for the best. The best change was the decision to put more emphasis on the character of Richie Tozier.

Richie is played by Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard in Chapter 1 and Barry’s Bill Hader in It Chapter Two, and his journey is so damn important. Richie is hard to miss in any adaptation, with his natural snark and deflective humor, something that is all too familiar to anyone in the LGBTQ community. Who hasn’t swatted away any inkling that they might be anything other than the cookie cutter cisgender straight American their peers thought they knew with a dark joke or a variation on “I know you are but what am I”?

Richie Tozier sure has; in fact, that is his entire foundation as a character.

The mythology behind Pennywise is inherently fascinating, but one of the biggest keys to his power is the fact that he knows damn well what scares you more than anything in the world, and how to destroy you with it. For Bill Denbrough, it is the guilt over his younger brother, Georgie, being eaten by Pennywise himself (which of course kickstarts the entire story); for Beverly Marsh it’s her abusive father and homelife. For Richie it is something that every LGBTQ person, even as an adult in 2019 America, knows entirely too well.

Pennywise knows that nothing terrifies Richie more than the thought of anyone, anyone learning that he is a queer man.

When we see him as an adult, Richie is doing pretty damn well for himself. He is a famous stand-up comedian who is about to film a one-hour special, presumably for Netflix or Hulu, when he receives the call from Mike Hanlon to come back to Derry. He even mentions, during one of the handful of times that he tries to escape, that he’s “got dates in Reno, man.”

He has a lot going for himself. And for his friends to know his inner truth, let alone the entire world, is a massive risk that could viably end his career. We like to think sometimes that we’re so woke as a society, that things are so different for the LGBTQ community… why is this an issue anymore? I mean, we can get married now, right? Life’s good.

Well… yes and no.

LGBTQ people can still be legally fired in over half of the country — including Virginia, unless you work for the government — and conversion therapy is still very much legal in thirty-three states (although Virginia has been working toward a ban of the process). While Hollywood is traditionally more liberal-leaning, it still has a massive issue with allowing LGBTQ people the right to portray their own stories. Ironically, this is demonstrated by the fact that the actors who portray Richie in both parts of this film series are straight (to my knowledge). But that is another long argument for another day. 

The elongated point remains – Richie has everything to lose. And Pennywise knows it. He taunts him in the park outside of the arcade, where we see in a flashback that Richie tried to flirt with another boy, only to take it back and hide it, then was still forced out as slurs were screamed at him. As he remembers this, Pennywise floats down with a bouquet of balloons taunting him: “I know your dirty little secret.”

Richie Tozier is the hero of this entire piece for us, and he was from the very start. We see in flashbacks and at the end that he carved in the infamous kissing bridge the letters, “R + E” to allude that our favorite hypochondriac, Eddie Kaspbrak, was his first love. Richie wants to leave the entire time that he’s there, but who can really blame him? When he keeps coming back, it’s for his friends, sure — but also for his love.

He ultimately became bigger than his fear and uses it to fight back against Pennywise. Who knew that that was what would ultimately win King’s best known Boss Battle?

Well, I guess you did if you read the book. It has been out for 33 years.

What destroys Pennywise is the reminder that he is nothing; that your fear does not rule you. Richie reminded Pennywise that he was just a stupid clown, and in that moment, also reminded himself that he couldn’t let his fear of being outed narrate his life.

I will – and have, sorry to anyone in my life – tell anyone within earshot how fantastic of a film It: Chapter Two is. I’ve already seen it twice in local theaters. While it is hardly marketed or structured as the LGBTQ empowerment film of the year, the fact that both Muschietti and Hader made an intentional point of leaning completely into Richie’s identity and journey is so important.

Much like other marginalized communities, the LGBTQ community is often told what we are and are not capable of. While I’m pretty sure that being able to take down a primordial entity who takes the form of a depression-era clown was not something we were rallying for, well… I don’t know about y’all, but I’m all about embracing the shit out of that. 

All Images via Warner Bros. Entertainment

Arizona Supreme Court Delivers Victory To the Forces of Discrimination

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Anti-gay Christian conservatives are falling all over themselves to discriminate against gay weddings. And courts keep on letting them.

The Arizona Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of a calligraphy and wedding invitation company whose owners claim their religion forbids them to sell to same-sex couples. Brush & Nib Studio owners Joanna Duka and Breanna Koski are represented by Alliance Defending Freedom. ADF also wrote their business operating agreement, according to ABC 10, before filing the lawsuit on the couple’s behalf.

The court ruled 4-3 that the City of Phoenix “cannot apply its Human Relations Ordinance … to force Joanna Duka and Breanna Koski … to create custom wedding invitations celebrating same-sex wedding ceremonies in violation of their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

This is a narrow ruling in that the court noted that its decision applies only to custom wedding invitations.

“We do not recognize a blanket exemption from the Ordinance for all of Plaintiffs’ business operations.”

“Duka and Koski’s beliefs about same-sex marriage may seem old-fashioned, or even offensive to some. But the guarantees of free speech and freedom of religion are not only for those who are deemed sufficiently enlightened, advanced, or progressive. They are for everyone. After all, while our own ideas may be popular today, they may not be tomorrow,” the court added.

At issue is the City of Phoenix’s six-year-old anti-discrimination ordinance, which ADF attacked in court.

The lawsuit was first filed in 2016. Duka and Koski are not suing because they have been accused of discrimination. They are preemptively suing for the “right” to reject lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender customers. The business owners lost a 2017 judgment and appealed in 2018.

The Southern Poverty Law Center includes the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) on its list of anti-gay hate groups. SPLC in 2017 reported Brush & Nib is also a vendor on Etsy, and “voluntarily and willingly agreed to the vendor terms of service for the site, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

AZ Central notes that the state’s Supreme Court “has been packed by Gov. Doug Ducey with judges to his liking.” Ducey is a Republican.

Like many local non-discrimination ordinances, Phoenix’s bans discrimination “based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or disability,” AZ Central adds.

Next month the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in three cases of anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Their ruling will have historic effects.

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM