Posted on 04/04/2019 11:34:00 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism
The San Antonio Airport was rated as the sixth worst airport in the country. So, the city fathers got together and decided to fix the airport by banning businesses that donate to the Salvation Army.
Or at least one business.
“San Antonio is a city full of compassion, and we do not have room in our public facilities for a business with a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior," San Antonio Councilman Roberto Trevino declared, after blocking Chick-fil-A from opening at the airport.
Does Chick-fil-A prohibit gay people from buying chicken? No, but they donate to the Salvation Army.
Local media and ThinkProgress claimed that the move was in response to a report by the leftist anti-religious site accusing Chick-fil-A of giving charitable donations to groups with “anti-LGBTQ records”.
What are those groups? The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army.
Specifically, the Chick-fil-A Foundation donated $1,653,416 to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and $150,000 to the Salvation Army. The FCA was denounced by ThinkProgress for its “sexual purity” policy. And what did the bell ringers of the Salvation Army trying to raise money for the poor do wrong?
According to TP, the Salvation Army is an anti-gay hate group because it “at the time of the donations had a written policy of merely complying with local ‘relevant employment laws’” which “since changed to indicate a national policy of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The standards for being an anti-gay hate group have really gotten low.
It’s 2019.
Two years ago, Chick-fil-A donated money to the Salvation Army, which had a policy of “complying with local ‘relevant employment laws’”, and must now be banned from the sixth-worst airport in America.
According to Councilman Roberto Trevino, San Antonio is a “city full of compassion” and therefore no company that donates money to the Salvation Army’s efforts to help the poor is allowed is the city.
Nothing says compassion like banning companies that give money to the Salvation Army.
In ancient times, there was a biblical city also starting with an ‘S’ whose city council so institutionalized cruelty to the poor that they terrorized any travelers who winged their way through their ‘airport’.
Today, it doesn’t have an airport. It does have a pillar of salt.
San Antonio’s crackdown is especially bizarre since the Salvation Army is a popular destination for corporate gifts. Major donors include American Airlines, Delta, FedEx and UPS all of whom, hopefully, operate in the sixth-worst airport in America. Does San Antonio Airport plan to ban Delta flights?
The Salvation Army has a major presence in San Antonio running shelters and helping seniors. It’s scheduled for an event with former First Lady Laura Bush in San Antonio in May. Just not at the airport.
But this story of politically correct cruelty to the poor and religious discrimination gets even worse.
“I want the first thing see is a San Antonio that is welcoming and that they not see … a symbol of hate,” Councilman Manny Pelaez ranted. “I don’t want a restaurant that isn’t available on Sunday either.”
The first thing that Christians will see in the sixth-worst airport in America is that they aren’t welcome.
Sunday was the official excuse that San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg also gave for banning Chick-fil-A.
“There are many people in the community that are uncomfortable with Chick-fil-A,” Nirenberg rambled. “Have you ever tried to buy waffle fries on a Sunday? They’re closed! Fifteen percent of sales generated in the airport come on a Sunday.”
Chick-fil-A is anti-gay and should be banned. Also they don’t let me buy their waffle fries on Sunday.
The complaint that closing on Sundays will mean revenue losses is spurious. Chick-fil-A is the best-performing large fast food chain in the country. Its revenues across the country haven’t been hurt by closing on Sundays. There’s no reason to think that even in the sixth-worst airport in the country, its revenues will suffer by maintaining its religious values of setting “aside one day to rest and worship”.
Chick-fil-A opponents like Nirenberg and Pelaez seized on the ‘Sunday’ excuse because it sounded better than banning the eatery from the airport because it donated to the Salvation Army. But Chick-fil-A’s policy of closing on Sundays is a reflection of its founder’s Christian beliefs. San Antonio’s move is the equivalent of punishing an Orthodox Jew for closing on the Sabbath. And is completely illegal.
San Antonio’s council violated its own laws, the laws of Texas and the laws of the United States.
Councilman Roberto Trevino claimed that by engaging in religious discrimination, “the City Council reaffirmed the work our city has done to become a champion of equality and inclusion.”
Discrimination is the opposite of equality and inclusion. And now San Antonio is in trouble.
“The City of San Antonio’s decision to exclude a respected vendor based on the religious beliefs associated with that company and its owners is the opposite of tolerance,” Attorney General Paxton warned, opening an investigation into the city’s illegal discriminatory conduct.
The Trump administration's Department of Transportation has also been encouraged to take a look.
San Antonio’s discriminatory conduct exemplifies the brand of anti-Christian discrimination warned about by David Horowitz in his new book, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America.
“Today, the free exercise of religion has ceased to be a guaranteed right in America. Instead, it has become a battlefield,” David Horowitz wrote.
It’s only fitting that San Antonio, the home of the Alamo, should once again be the battlefield of the war for America’s freedoms. And before coming after freedom, Trevino and the bosses came for the Alamo.
The last time, Roberto Trevino and San Antonio’s leadership had disgraced itself this thoroughly was during the campaign to vandalize the Alamo site and move the Cenotaph. Back then, Trevino had claimed that the goal was breaking down the divisions caused by the Alamo story.
“We can tell stories without making any one group of people feel like they’re villains,” Trevino had whined. “This is a complex story. Even our heroes are flawed, and I think it’s a time to show that humanity is complex.”
First, they came for the Alamo and then for the First Amendment.
Around that same time, Councilman Trevino’s office was accused by his former council aide of abusing taxpayer resources by assigning campaign activities during working hours. Our heroes may be flawed. But we do have villains. And they, like Trevino, are more than just flawed. They are evil. And hate good.
Punishing a popular eatery for donating to the poor isn’t the behavior of flawed people, but of villains. The villainous religious discrimination championed by Trevino, Nirenberg and Pelaez is un-American.
Councilman Roberto Trevino can’t be satisfied with vandalizing the Alamo and instead decided to also trash the First Amendment. San Antonio has enacted discrimination in the name of fighting discrimination. Chick-fil-A was not discriminating against anyone in San Antonio. Its crime was donating to religious organizations whose views about morality and decency, Trevino didn’t like. Or perhaps he hated their policy of helping the poor, providing shelter to families in need and offering disaster relief.
It’s hard to know.
In San Antonio, as in another ancient city starting with an ‘S’, cruelty is called compassion, intolerance is justified as inclusion, and banishing religious people is depicted as the conduct of a welcoming city.
When everything is this upside down, it’s hard to know just how upside-down San Antonio is.
To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, when intolerance comes to America, it will be wrapped in inclusion and diversity. And it will land at the sixth-worst airport in America where the flights are always late, the seats smell like stale beer, and the only thing dirtier than the toilets are the agendas of the council members.
Salvation Army is the only charity I donate to-other than the collection basket of my parish church when I go to Mass-I know they stand for Christian values, and that is important to me-I won’t even patronize any restaurant in SA, or any other business there-if my guy wants to eat out with me, we’re going to a local farm-to-table, and he will eat organic, drink Texas wine and like it-because those are my neighbors and good Christian people...
Let not try to improve the airport, let’s ban Chik Fil A from it...morons...
What....your church doesn't have an SVDP Conference (assuming from your use of the term "Mass" that you are Roman Catholic)??
No-this is a rural area-we even share a priest on a rotating Sunday basis with 3 other rural churches-there are only about 19,000 people in this entire county—that is about the number of people in the “real” city of Kerrville, which is in the next county-so our church is tiny as is our congregation, but our priest doesn’t ptrach the pope Francis socialist agenda-and we like that just fine...
The Lord has kept Salvation Army pretty clean over the years.
I used to do the same....then they went "politically correct"....and chose the wrong side. Now they don't get Roccus' money.
“Men look at the outside, but God looks at the heart.”
To stand for bible morality is not chicken feed. Let us be careful not to boycott the garbage man because he gets his hands dirty in carrying out municipal sanitation.
Chik-Fil-A has an outlet in Tampa International Airport...busy all the time...except Sundays...
My Baptist coworkers insist that Jesus turned water into grape juice at Cana, never mind what the chief steward said to the groom about wasting the best wine on guests who were already snockered.
Yeah... I don’t go for that line of theological oenology.
Martin Luther seems to have had a good idea of moderation. And Jesus personally got involved enough in food and drink celebrations that He was accused of being a winebibber (and a glutton for that matter). Too much Welch’s? It doesn’t sound like it, in an age where refrigeration didn’t exist unless, maybe, you were like Rome and were powerful enough to get slaves to bring ice in.
I wouldn’t argue, but just let the grace of God make appropriate testimony. Moderation, whose exact definition depends in part on a personal toleration for alcohol, is great. Overindulgence (for whatever reason) is bad and a sin.
With tongue in cheek, the Old Lutheran website offers this:
And did not Jesus declare at the Last Supper that He “would partake no more of the fruit of the vine” until His mission in this our world was complete?
And before that did He not “take the cup filled with wine” and consecrate it with the words, “This is My blood”?
The temperance movement of the 19th Century addressed real problems about alcohol in American society (a civil war can have that effect) but was it necessary to alter the meaning of Scripture in order to strengthen their argument?
There are those in Texas - and on this forum - who want to blame this all on the California influx.
California was once a Republican stronghold - before Ronald Reagan betrayed his adopted state with the Apocalyptic Amnesty. California produced two terms each for Reagan and Richard Nixon, native Californian.
Texas, on the other hand, has always had a powerful Democrat component. The evil Lyndon Baines Johnson (he of the sinister, subversive Johnson Amendment) and his equally evil political machine are alone proof of that.
The truth is that, before the disastrous Immigration and Nationality act of 1965, and the Immigration and Reform Act of 1986, California was more generally and consistently conservative and Republican than Texas. San Francisco and Hollywood were the exceptions, not the exemplars.
Texans have long tolerated Democrat corruption in their state, which has contributed to their current danger of turning “blue” - and that is not the fault of Californians, past or present.
Alcohol sterilizes. That was one of the reasons for using fermentation.
Like maybe Hawaii or the Caribbean or some place like that?
(For god’s sakes - SA is a pit. I know - I did live there for a short time -3 months - way too long!)
It isn’t San Antonio, it’s the idiots we keep electing, the self-replicating, politically incestuous cabal that grows people like Trevino, the Castros and Nirenberg. In a city that’s 65% Latino, the Dems have it way too easy. Thank God there’s no longer a straight ticket option - we lost a lot of good conservative judges last time.
The Left just ruins cities if left untreated checked...I have to think district maps and R’s moving out or just not voting caused much of this.
We'll donate a portion of our PROFIT to the Salvation Army.
"Get out of our way,” they replied.
“This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge!
We’ll treat you worse than them.”
They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door.
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.73447,-99.08401,41105m/data=!3m1!1e3
Go swim in the river, rent a canoe-or visit the antique shops from Pipe Creek to Kerrville, the apple orchard town of Medina,
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
