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Dan Cathy, the CEO of national fast food chain Chick-fil-A, finally opened up to the press about his true motives for opposing gay marriage: he doesn’t want his son to have one.
“Homosexuality as an abstract concept I have no problem with,” said Cathy. “But I’d really like my son Andrew to find a nice woman to settle down with. Maybe, if I’m lucky, a couple of grandkids.”
Cathy recognized that his sweeping generalization wasn’t an obvious response to his fears for his son, but explained his reasoning. “I’m really not comfortable talking to my son about this sort of thing one-on-one. But if Andrew were to read about this in the papers, maybe he would understand how I feel about him marrying a man.”
“Saying, ‘Marriage is between one man and one woman’ is more straightforward than saying, ‘Marriage is between one man and one woman, or two women, or two men,’ so long as my son Andrew isn’t one of those men,” Cathy explained. “Not to mention catchier.”
“Chick-fil-A prides itself on being a family business,” said Paul Derry, head spokesman for Chick-fil-A. “And part of that ethos is acting as a proxy to deliver messages between members of the Cathy family.”
Derry pointed to the 1995 incident in which Chick-fil-A’s nationwide halting production of breakfast sandwiches, explaining that Cathy simply needed to let his wife Rhonda know that they were out of eggs.
While Cathy’s original remarks on gay marriage were met with widespread hostility, many of his detractors have come forward to apologize in light of the news. “What we have here is not an expression of bigotry, hate, or evangelicalism,” said Herndon Graddick, president of GLAAD. “It’s a heartwarming instance of a father reaching out to his son. And nobody can get in the way of that.”
When Andrew introduced his father to his new girlfriend Mandy, the elder Cathy quickly condemned heterosexual marriage as well, defending his stance by concluding, “God made Adam and Eve, not My son Andrew and what’s-her-name from floozy-town. These are the values upon which Chick-fil-A is founded.”
