AUGUST 1 2012
Landmark Shopping Mall Food Court
The Landmark Mall has been in decline for the last few decades, and it shows in the number of empty storefronts and the scarcity of people doing much of anything there. The packs of teens and tweens are gone and adult shoppers are few.
The top-floor food court, which once held ten or more fast-food options, now only contains a few hold-outs and a "video arcade" with six machines - and no customers. But today, for one shop in this benighted mall, it was a return to the heyday of the 70s.
That shop is the fast-food chicken sandwich franchise "Chick-Fil-A". As the managers of the other surviving food franchises looked on with envy, people started lining up at about eleven AM to get a meal. By half past the hour the line contained almost one hundred people, with more coming.
Why was this day different from all other days? Because the diners were showing solidarity with the owner of Chick-Fil-A, who; for stating his personal Christian belief that marriage can only be the union of one man and one woman, has been told by the mayors of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco - Democrats all - to forget about opening a franchise in those cities.
The people lining up in such numbers for a chicken sandwich were doing more than having lunch. Many of them had to seek out this establishment, and many of them would not otherwise have set foot in Landmark mall. They were, in addition to getting a feed on, showing their defiance to these power-mad politicians who evidently think they can punish free speech.
Scenes like this aare playing out in nearly every Chick-Fil-A location in the nation, often with much bigger crowds. But it is a true measure of the intensity of this protest - which is not called a protest but rather an "appreciation day" - that even this location, tucked away in a corner of the third floor of a dilapidated and failing ghost-town of a shopping mall, was as flooded with customers as it would have been back in 1985 when the mall and the food court were the place to be.
This was not a protest against "gay marriage". It was a protest against the infringement of freedom of religion and of speech committed by these Democrat party officials when they threatened to deny Chick-Fil-A permission to operate in their bailiwicks solely because the owner of the company gave voice to personal religious beliefs that they don't care for.
The appreciative diners are not just a pack of gay-hating "right wing" Christian conservatives, either. Nationwide, not a few homosexuals showed up and made a point of saying that the arrogation of power by the Democrats repulsed and disturbed them much more than CEO Dan Cathy's constitutionally protected voicing of his own opinion. And in this respect, they have it exactly right.
There was a ballot cast today, and it was cast on the register tapes of every Chick-Fil-A franchise in the nation. Yet another sounding, growing ever louder, of the "twilight of the gods" for the Democrat party.
It's Gotterdammerung with fries.
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