Fordham University, a Roman Catholic private college in New York, has rejected a proposal to bring a Chick-fil-A restaurant to the campus after an LGBTQ group and other student groups expressed their concerns about the views on gay marriage held by the restaurant chain’s owners.
According to a report by the Fordham Observer, food servicer Aramark planned to install a Chick-fil-A restaurant in the college’s Ram Cafe. Prior to accepting the proposal, which was first offered in March, the university consulted with four student groups: United Student Government, Commuter Students Association, Residence Hall Association, and the Rainbow Alliance, an LGBTQ rights group.
Led by the Rainbow Alliance, student groups on campus began to express their concern about the university doing business with a noted opponent of gay marriage. The Observer reported in April Chick-fil-A agreed to offer “collaboratively run unspecified programming with the Rainbow Alliance in conjunction with the rollout of a venue on campus,” but the Rainbow Alliance rejected the proposal and voted unanimously to express its opposition to the restaurant’s presence.
The university announced at the end of April it had rejected Aramark’s proposal to bring Chick-fil-A on the campus.
“Part of me is hopeful that they’ll start taking this attitude of listening to queer students and queer voices, because there are so many on this campus and just in life,” said Renata Francesco, a co-president for the Rainbow Alliance, to the Observer.
In April, The Blaze reported students at Duquesne University, which is also a Catholic college, filed a petition against Chick-fil-A being allowed to operate on their campus.
In 2012, Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy said, “We are very much supportive of the family—the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.”
It’s interesting and hypocritical students at Catholic-affiliated colleges would be so opposed to having Chick-fil-A operate on campus when their own church’s position on homosexuality is in line with what the owners of Chick-fil-A believe.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved. … Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”
Justin Haskins
