In outraged
response to fast-food outlet Chick-fil-A’s opposition to same-sex marriage,
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino has publicly urged
the company not to open an outlet near the city’s Freedom Walk. More recently,
Chicago alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno has announced plans to try to prevent Chick-fil-A from opening its
second restaurant in the Windy City. This comes hard on the heels of the Jim
Henson Company’s decision
to end its erstwhile business partnership with the chicken-joint chain. As
wrong as Chick-fil-A’s stance on gay rights is, efforts like those of Menino
and Moreno are misguided and wrong. Governments should not be able to block
anyone from doing business in a given jurisdiction simply for espousing the
wrong viewpoints.
I should begin by
emphasizing that the efforts of private individuals and organizations to
boycott Chick-fil-A are quite legitimate. As other have already pointed
out, the company’s right to free speech in no way trumps the right of its
detractors to express their ire with its statements. The rest of us have every
right to make our displeasure with the restaurant chain known by protesting
against it—and by voluntarily withholding our dollars from it.
The company’s
treatment at the hands of government, however, is a different story. As an
assemblage of private citizens doing business together, Chick-fil-A has a right
to express whatever views it wants, no matter how noxious or foolish they may
be. Government, with its unparalleled coercive power and its constitutional
duty to respect the freedom of speech, has no business penalizing private
actors for uttering the wrong opinions. Speech, by itself, very rarely causes
anyone the kind of harm that government can legitimately punish. Moreover,
there is no right not to be offended by the propagation of ideas that one
deplores.
Still again,
giving government the power to chastise citizens in this manner sets a
dangerous precedent in favor of censorship. Those who don’t mind such
censorship when it is directed against their political adversaries should
beware, for many can play at that game. Sympathizers of Mayor Menino and
Alderman Moreno should ask themselves how they would react if, for instance, a
Bible Belt town banished a company whose president committed the “offense,” not
of actually performing abortions, but of merely speaking out in favor of
abortion rights. Menino’s and Moreno’s threats smack of the same hypocrisy Nat
Hentoff so adroitly identified as “Free
Speech for Me—But Not For Thee.”
Alderman Moreno
has dismissed free-speech concerns in this case, sniffing, “You have the right
to say what you want to say, but zoning is not a right.” This is beside the
point. If Chicago stops Chick-fil-A from doing business there in retaliation
for company president Dan Cathy’s pronouncements, it is using its zoning power
to punish the chain for exercising its’ owners’ and managers’ right to speak
freely. Whether they have a general right to be zoned into that particular
location is irrelevant. The issue is that the denial of a permit would be used
as a penalty for unpopular speech. The penalty need not be a denial of a right
in and of itself in order for its use to violate the freedom of speech.
Ultimately, those
who advocate such draconian state responses to unpopular speech are guilty
(however unwittingly) of intellectual cowardice. If the anti-same-sex marriage
position is so wrong—and I wholeheartedly agree that it is—then its opponents
should not fear taking it on in free and open debate. Frankly, they should
welcome every opportunity to expose the weakness of the arguments for it. By
using government power to suppress and intimidate it, however, they only leave
a (false) impression that advocates of marriage equality have no convincing
arguments to make for it. They also fuel opposition to
same-sex marriage by reinforcing social conservatives’ paranoid belief that
their faith is somehow persecuted in America today.
It is bad enough
when government chooses winners and losers in commercial markets. Doing so in
the marketplace of ideas is inexcusable. Menino, Moreno and their ilk would do
well to heed the words of the English poet John Milton: “Let [truth] and
falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open
encounter?”
