We've had our fill

I've avoided eating at Chick-fil-A for many years, not so much because they support various anti-gay programs, but because I've never cared for their food. I'm perfectly capable of making a terrible chicken sandwich at home and slathering on just enough mayo not to notice. That said, my personal boycott of Chick-fil-A is fairly meaningless, but my family's boycott of Chick-fil-A is another matter. Because my wife and I have raised our children with positive humanistic ethical values, they know it is wrong to treat gays as second class citizens or send them off to reeducation camps. Chick-fil-A has lost our patronage as a family.

Family, after all, is what this is all about. There are loving families like my own, who are willing to accept our LGBT friends and relatives. There are also hateful families who push them away, threaten them with torture by fire, and try to have them cured. There are the families formed by gay and lesbian couples, and there are the extended families formed by local LGBT communities. The hateful families would prefer for the loving families to give up on phrases such as 'family values' so that they can portray themselves as sole standard-bearers of what it means to be a good and proper family unit.

I'm not having that. My family has values, and our values are vastly better than those being demonstrated and marketed by the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and all the other right-wing bigotry-peddlers. We don't need a fearful enemy to bond us together as a family, all we need is our love for each other. As a family, we value tolerance, inclusivity, and joy rather than intolerance, exclusivity, and fear. We value our lesbian neighbors, and we think it's adorable that their daughter has a crush on our son. We value my sister-in-law and her partner just as we value my brother-in-law and his wife. We value real people who live and love rather than ancient books filled with death and hate.

As a family, we've had our fill of bigotry, homophobia, and Chick-Fil-A. If that's what you're serving, we won't be showing up.