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The Guardian: Chick-fil-A is where American politics really lives, so eat it
In America, a fast-food chain opposing gay marriage has engaged people in a way that politicians can only dream of.
Americans are apparently so bored with the 2012 election campaign that a chicken sandwich has easily taken over as the most interesting thing to talk about this summer. While Mitt Romney criss-crossed his way from London to Warsaw in an attempt to, perhaps, replicate the pre-presidential foreign trip Barack Obama pulled off with aplomb four years ago, back home in the US, everyone else was wondering what eating a fried chicken filet said about their morals. This is where politics now really lives, so eat it.
The backstory is well-known by now. The CEO of Chick-fil-A decided to let it be known how he felt about gay marriage (opposed it), spawning a backlash from consumers, some major municipal mayors, and – perhaps fittingly – the Muppets. The whole thing was quickly framed as part of a new cultural war that is currently tearing America apart at its seams – the kind of episode that fits extremely well into a cultural and media narrative. Better, in fact, than Romney's bumbling foreign adventures, which rather than providing voters with a storyline on which they could take a practiced ideological stand, was likely to be seen as a mostly embarrassing, ultimately unrelatable foreign policy glad-hand tour, set to Yackety Sax. If it was seen at all.
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