Chick-fil-A to Stop Anti-LGBTQ+ Donations

In a surprising but welcome move, Chick-fil-A announced Monday that it will stop funding anti-LGBTQ+ organizations.

The fast food chicken chain had donated millions of dollars to anti-LGBTQ+ Christian organizations like the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), but Chick-fil-A says that it will no longer send any money to those organizations. The move comes as Salvation Army also details to Out how it has also halted its homophobic policies.

A spokeswoman for Chick-fil-A told Reuters that the company had made multi-year commitments to both Salvation Army and FCA, but "we fulfilled those obligations in 2018."

The company says it will focus instead on donating to charities that focus on "education, homelessness and hunger." That's a pretty big change from its funding of the WinShape Foundation, a nonprofit that specifically backs anti-LGBTQ+ activism around the world, including Uganda's famous "Kill the Gays" bills. In 2017, Chick-fil-A gave them $21.3 million dollars, which the organization in turn used to fund Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and the National Christian Foundation.

This money, and specifically money from the National Christian Foundation, was used to fund The Call, a religious organization founded by Lou Engle, who traveled to Uganda a decade ago to speak in support of that country's first "Kill the Gays" bill. He told Ugandan activists that their country was "ground zero of the great war with homosexuality."

All of this led to years-long protests against the company, which had been ramping up recently. Protests in the U.K. even forced the nation's first Chick-fil-A location to lose its lease after just eight days of being open.

This is a very welcome move and is sure to make a lot of chicken sandwich lovers very happy. Unfortunately, the company's product is still wildly inferior to the recently released Popeye's chicken sandwich.

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