An overwhelming number of chicken sandwiches were served on Wednesday as vast numbers of Americans from all over the country turned out to support Chick-fil-A, under fire for its CEO taking the highly controversial and shocking position that people of the same sex can’t marry each other. Could that be a catalyst for a popular revolt against gay marriage?
Richard Fernandez observes that “Great fires start from small sparks, as often happens when there is enough dry tinder on the ground.” He points out that the Arab Spring started with the harassment of a street vendor, that the public got behind the American revolution when the British raised the tax on tea. He then brings up a great story about what precipitated the Swiss rising up to throw off the Hapsburg empire:
The legend as told by Tschudi (ca. 1570) goes as follows: “William Tell, who originally came from Bürglen, was known as a strong man and an expert shot with the crossbow. In his time, the Habsburg emperors of Austria were seeking to dominate Uri. Albrecht (or Hermann) Gessler, the newly appointed Austrian Vogt of Altdorf, raised a pole in the village’s central square, hung his hat on top of it, and demanded that all the townsfolk bow before the hat. On 18 November 1307, Tell visited Altdorf with his young son and passed by the hat, publicly refusing to bow to it, and so was arrested. Gessler — intrigued by Tell’s famed marksmanship, yet resentful of his defiance — devised a cruel punishment: Tell and his son would be executed, but he could redeem his life by shooting an apple off the head of his son, Walter, in a single attempt. Tell split the apple with a bolt from his crossbow.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. What is remarkable about Gessler’s Hat is that it was about anything except the hat. It’s very insignificance as an object of forced respect showed that it was all about arbitrary domination. Gessler had made his hat holy, as Caligula had made his horse a consul, and everyone was expected to acknowledge it. Thus it was above all about power, made all the more manifest by its exercise in the most capricious and petty ways, for most any king can command a respect for his person. But only a tyrant can demand the veneration of his underwear.
Rahm Emanuel’s insistence that Chick-fil-A bow to the icon of gay marriage had that effect, at least upon some. Chick-fil-A is not about gay marriage or Christianity at all, any more than the incident of William Tell was about a hat. It’s about power. It is morphing into an overt test of whether the cultural elite can have its way. The problem with National Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day is that it constitutes an act of open defiance by manifesting all too publicly the contempt that a fairly large segment of the population has for shibboleths of political correctness.
via Belmont Club » The Chicken Disses the Hat.
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