The Vegetarian/Vegan Anorexia Connection

Before I go getting all academic, last week was celebrity vegan week at Plant.  On Tuesday, Carol Adams dropped by for a three hour dinner, and, a week later, I'm still walking around going, "I got to eat dinner with Carol Adams."  She blogged about it here.

 

Carol and me.  I. Am. Happy.

Then on Wednesday, on their way to the DNC, Elizabeth and Dennis Kucinich dropped by for lunch.

I look like crap in this photo, but I attribute that to the fact that I am standing near Elizabeth Kucinich, who is a goddess.  Also pictured: Leslie, Alan, and Jason.

OK, so now to business:

According to historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, “historical, anthropological, and psychological studies suggest that women use appetite as a form of expression more often than men, a tendency confirmed by scholars as well as clinicians” (5), and her work traces the prevalence of so-called disordered eating in women from the phenomenon of anorexia mirabilis that took place in medieval Europe between 1200 and 1500 and during which “many women refused their food and prolonged fasting was considered a female miracle” (Fasting 43) to our present day understanding of the concept of anorexia nervosa as pathologically disordered. What is divinely inspired at one point is disordered at another, and what is obvious, both in Brumberg’s study and elsewhere, is that the concept of ascetic eating – even to the point of starvation – particularly among young women, has a long and complicated history.

 Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), who would be considered bulimic if she lived now.

For Kim Chernin, eating disorders serve as dysfunctional rites of passage for women in a society that does not allow for legitimate and transformative female rites of passage.  As such, the eating disorder is in some sense a misguided feminist attempt to form and then assert a fully realized female subjectivity into a space that does not adequately offer women roles that are distinct from, or not determined by, patriarchy.  Traditionally, rites of passage allow for the uninitiated participant to separate from and then reintegrate with his or her community.  Eating disorders, however, do not allow for reconnection with a clearly defined community that would then lead to the next stage of development, in large part because within Western culture, there are no female communities that are not inherently linked to and dependent upon male culture; women’s culture is, in effect, men’s culture. 

As a result, the “disordered” individual is stuck in time; according to Chernin, “much of the obsessive quality of an eating disorder arises precisely from the fact that food is being asked to serve a transformative function that it cannot carry by itself” (167).  Despite the fact that anorexia nervosa had been “known to physicians as early as the 1870s,” the American press did not start writing about anorexia until the 1980s (Brumberg 11).  And since the 1980s, an increasing body of research has explored the links between vegetarian and vegan diets and disordered eating, noting the possible connections that exist between women’s refusal to eat meat and anorexia nervosa.

In their 1986 study, Rao Kadambari, Simon Gowers, and Arthur Crisp conclude the following:

It can be said that vegetarianism within anorexia nervosa is probably associated with overall dietary restraint within the illness, with mothers who are themselves concerned about their weight, and with a family background wherein there is avoidance of contact with the feared outside world.  These findings invite testable hypotheses within new prospective studies. (544)

Since this study, others have followed.  In their 2000 study “Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders: Partners in Crime?,” Victoria Sullivan and Sadhana Damani assert that their own vegetarianism “never stopped [them from] eating” (265), and that, as vegetarians, they feel protective of that identity and “would like to be able to state categorically that there is no association between vegetarianism and eating disorders” (265).  But even as their study points to some contradictory findings with regard to the connection between eating disorders and a vegetarian diet, they ultimately note that “although the evidence on the whole is limited and contradictory, it does seem that there is at least a passing association between vegetarianism and dietary restraint, and possibly eating disorders” (265).

 

And more recent studies seem to corroborate and expound upon the connections between vegetarianism and anorexia, particularly within adolescent anorectics.  In his 2011 study Some we Love, Some we Hate, Some we Eat: Why it’s so Hard to Think Straight about Animals, Hal Herzog quotes a former vegetarian anorectic named “Staci” who notes that as a teenager, “being a vegetarian was a way for me to have more control over my body by taking the fat out of my diet,” and she notes as well that vegetarianism appealed to her because of its “righteousness:” “at that age, you want to have something that is strong and clear and righteous” (197). 

Finally, speaking of a 2012 study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Melissa Jeltsen notes that, while this research does not argue that being vegetarian causes eating disorders or that being vegetarian is unhealthy, “it suggests vegetarianism can be a symptom of an eating disorder for some women,” given the fact that of women with histories of eating disorders, “68 percent said there was a relationship between the two,” and the researchers found “that 52 percent of women with a history of eating disorders had been vegetarian at some point in their lives” (Jeltsen). 

In all honesty, I find it completely unsurprising that vegetarianism and adolescent female anorexia are in some instances linked, even for reasons other than the fact that adolescent girls may very well lie about being vegetarian in order to abstain from eating.  But speaking of lying about behavior, adolescents lie all the time in order to hide subversive, counter-cultural, and dangerous behaviors from adults; anorexic teenagers are only one such example. 

Consider another.  First, if a person lies about being vegetarian – for whatever reason, whether to mask an eating disorder or to impress one’s girlfriend who is a vegetarian – but eats meat (is a carnivore) or does not eat anything at all (is an anorectic), one is not really a vegetarian; one is lying. End of story.  If someone lies about going to church as a cover for going to buy drugs, that lie could ostensibly happen for the same reasons: to mask an addiction (which anorexia is as well) or to impress one’s church-going girlfriend, but there do not appear to be any studies linking going to church to drug use (when the drug user is not, in fact, really going to church), while there are studies that continually link vegetarianism to eating disorders, even when the anorectic is not a vegetarian. 

I believe that these studies continue to proliferate because vegetarianism is represented within them via the same rhetoric of pathology that is used to describe anorexia and because female vegetarianism constitutes a choice that offers both a challenge to patriarchy and to a dietary norm dependent upon that patriarchy.  And, finally, because for young women, both anorexia and vegetarianism may be indicative, as Brumberg asserts about anorexia, of mentalities in transition” (Fasting 99); both are unrealized identity formations called upon to allow adolescent women to participate in rites of passage into a full adult female community that simply does not exist.

In all of this research, I have been able to find a singular study that challenges the abundance of others out there linking vegetarianism to anorexia.  B. Fisak’s 2006 “Challenging Previous Conceptions of Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders” does something that the other studies do not do: it examines the motives for vegetarianism and discovers, unsurprisingly, that vegetarians “tend to avoid animal products for ethical and health reasons rather than as an excuse or cover for dietary restraint” (199). The authors conclude that prior studies have argued that vegetarianism “may be an attempt to mask disordered eating” while their “study expanded upon prior research by making a variety of comparisons with psychometrically sound measures of eating disorders” to discover that “in contrast to previous findings, Vs and NVs [non-vegetarians] did not differ significantly on any eating disturbance measures” (198).  

To return to the concept of the ineffective rite of passage as it relates to both anorexia and vegetarianism, I want to posit an assertion that works to further differentiate vegetarianism from veganism, as I feel that one is not simply the more “severe” form of the other, even as, in these studies, if veganism factors in at all, it is as a "severe" form of vegetarianism (as per Rao et al).  By the way, this is a hypothesis, so don't kill me for making it.  

Terrible comic relief.  But you've got to be sick of reading by now.

For some young women caught shuttling between vegetarianism and anorexia, caught in a space that seems to support the perpetual linkage between the two, veganism may very well function as the culmination of a successful, feminist rite of passage, an identity category that allows food to serve the transformative function that anorexia unsuccessfully asks it to serve.  Because veganism may very well be less about dietary restriction and more about an anti-speciesist ethic, a shift from vegetarianism to veganism might allow for productive growth -- at least for some women. 

I know that in my case, at least, that was the scenario.  My vegetarianism was very much tied up with the eating disorder that fully manifested itself by the time I was 19, but I think that for women who find themselves in such circumstances, the connections between these two things – vegetarianism and eating disorders – are much more complicated than simply one serving as an excuse for the other. Without going into great detail about what solidified my decision to become vegetarian, not eating meat made sense to me, and I was not eating meat for ethical reasons; I have never doubted that reality, and I was not lying about the ethical commitment that made me decide to become vegetarian, even as my eating disorder thrived in tandem with my vegetarianism.  One was not a mask for the other, nor was one responsible for the other. 

At the time that I became vegetarian, I had not really cared about what was good for me; I just knew that I did not want to eat animals.  Years later, when I became vegan, I made a conscious choice to eat more fully and to eat better, to consume things that would make me healthy and strong, to eat food that was fresh, whole, and not processed.  The goal was as much one of self-empowerment as animal liberation – and because the connections between those two things were now clear to me, I was able to be empowered by this choice.  Becoming vegan, in its most feminist manifestation, meant doing something actively in response to a cultural stasis that dictated dietary behavior with which I simply did not agree.  I just had to figure out why I did not agree with it.  This time around, I was reacting in ways that felt fully conscious, and that consciousness has allowed me to eat – and live – more and better than I ever did before.

Including animal rights in the discussion about why women choose to become vegetarian or vegan certainly will not alleviate the negative discourse about veganism that pervades both the mainstream media and scientific studies of the links between non-normative diet and eating disorders, but it would certainly allow for more honest analysis, and it might empower instead of pathologize such a choice as having less to do with restricting female diet and more to do with making productive connections between health, feminism, and animal welfare.

If you have a narrative about veganism and eating disorders that runs counter to the various studies that continue to perpetuate linkages between vegetarian and vegan diets and anorexia, I would like to hear it – and with your permission, possibly use it in my own study.  Please send me your stories in 1000 words or less at lwright@email.wcu.edu or post them below.  And thanks in advance.

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Works Cited

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa.  New York: Vintage, 2000.  Print.

Chernin, Kim.  The Hungry Self.  New York: Harper and Row, 1985.  Print.

Fisak, B. et al.  “Challenging Previous Conceptions of Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders.”  Eating and Weight Disorders: Studies in Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity 11.4 (2006): 195-201.  Print.

Herzog, Hal.  Some we Love, Some we Hate, Some we Eat:  Why it’s so Hard to Think Straight about Animals.  New York: Harper, 2011.  Print.

Kadambari, Rao, Simon Gowers, and Arthur Crisp.  “Some Correlates of Vegetarianism in Anorexia Nervosa.”  International Journal of Eating Disorders 5.3 (1986): 539-544.  Print.

Sullivan, Victoria and Sadhana Damani.  “Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders – Partners in Crime?”  European Eating Disorders Review 8.4 (2000): 263-266.  Print.

Some thoughts on Death by Veganism, Legitimacy, and the War on Women

I’ve been working on some material about the reported connection between eating disorders and vegetarianism, and I ended up in a place I wasn’t expecting, focusing, for a few pages, on the media’s linking of several cases of infant mortality to veganism.  I’ve read some of the commentary about these cases in the past, but I hadn’t really realized until now the ways that much of the criticism has focused on the role that the supposed nutritional inadequacy of the mothers’ breast milk plays in these cases, which got me thinking – as much has lately – about external attempts to control female bodies, particularly when it comes to their status or potential status as maternal bodies, and about questions of legitimacy, in this case, in terms of diet.

           

Consider the nature of the media discourse about veganism more closely: Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan, in their 2011 study “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourse of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspapers,” used the LexisNexis database to search the terms “vegan,” “vegans,” and “veganism” in all UK newspapers for the 2007 calendar year in order to analyze the Foucauldian concept of discourse[i] – whether positive, neutral, or negative – with regard to the topic of veganism.  Of the 397 articles that they examined, only 22 (5.5 percent) were positive; 80 (20.2 percent) were neutral, and 295 (a whopping 74.3 percent) were negative (138).  Of the articles that treated veganism negatively, the authors characterized the negative discourse by placing it in one of six categories.  These are, in order of frequency of occurrence, ridiculing veganism, characterizing veganism as asceticism, describing veganism as difficult or impossible to sustain, describing veganism as a fad, characterizing vegans as oversensitive, and characterizing vegans as hostile (139).  

...but the news media doesn't.

According to Cole and Morgan,

empirical sociological studies of vegans are rare . . . .  When they are present as research participants, they are usually treated as a subset of vegetarians and their veganism tends to be viewed as a form of dietary asceticism involving exceptional efforts of self-transformation.  (135)

What such studies tend to overlook, therefore, is the importance of animal rights for vegans, an area of research that remains largely unexplored.  If it is, according to Cole and Morgan, “plausible to assert that on the basis of existing evidence, veganism is understood by most vegans . . . as an aspect of anti-speciesist practice” (135), then cultural discourse that conflates veganism and vegetarianism (on the one hand) or that views veganism as simply a more severe form of vegetarian dietary restriction (on the other) disregards the primary motivation for veganism – animal rights and animal liberation – as it focuses instead on a rhetoric of dietary restriction, denial, and privation.  And while this study was conducted in the UK, the discourse about veganism is similar, if not more negative, in the US.

           

Perhaps nowhere can the linkage between discussions of veganism and issues of privation be seen as clearly as in “Death by Veganism,” Nina Planck’s 2007 editorial in the New York Times that discusses Crown Shakur, who died at six weeks of age after “his vegan parents . . . fed him mainly soy milk and apple juice” (Planck).  As a result of their son’s death, the parents were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.  Planck, who, according to the article, was once a vegan herself, is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why; her web page claims Planck is an advocate of “traditional foods. She will liberate you to eat red meat, butter, raw milk, and lard.” For Planck, a “vegan pregnancy was irresponsible” (“Death by Veganism”), and she asserts that in her study of indigenous cultures, “there are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long term” (“Death by Veganism”).  In her outrage at parents who would deny their child animal-based food, she makes inaccurate claims,[ii] particularly that vitamin B12 is “found only in animal foods,”[iii] and equates veganism with faddism, noting that “food is more important than fashion.”  As an aside, if you want to read what I consider an informed response, go here.

Not at all fashionable.

 

In addition to the case of Crown Shakur and the outrage against veganism that it sparked, since 2001, worldwide there have been four other cases of infant mortality that have been depicted in the news media as having resulted, in some form or other, from veganism: in addition to one other case in the United States in 2005, there was a 2008 case in France, a 2001 case in the UK, and a 2002 case in New Zealand.  The news stories all focus on the vegan status of the parents – and in at least two cases, on the inadequate nature of the breast milk of the negligent vegan mothers – as well as on the diets that they fed their children prior to death. 

A March 30, 2011 headline in the Mail Online reads “French Vegan Couple Whose Baby Died of Vitamin Deficiency after being fed Solely on Breast Milk Face Jail for Child Neglect.”  The couple, Sergine and Joel Le Moaligou, are described as “militant vegans” in the article.  In an article about the case in New Zealand, the author notes “Roby and Deborah Moorhead are vegans. . . . Mrs. Moorhead’s breast milk was deficient in B12 and inadequate for Caleb’s nutritional needs.”  In addition to their radical diet, the Moorheads are also characterized as “radical Christians,” and supposed extreme religious beliefs are likewise linked to veganism and the 2005 death of Woyah Andressohn of Miami: “it has also been reported the family's diet may have been connected to their religion, known as ‘Hebrew Israelite’ which promotes raw food and natural eating.”

OK, so a disclaimer, which I would hope is unnecessary, but I’ll add nonetheless: to critique the presentation of these cases is in no way to undermine or downplay the seriousness of the circumstances that led to the death of these children.  It is, however, an attempt to look at these cases in a broader context and to examine the sensationalizing rhetoric that depicts veganism as a menacing danger inflicted by negligent, uninformed parents – primarily mothers – on their children.  For some perspective: according to the Centers for Disease Control’s infant mortality statistics for 2008, “the U.S. infant mortality rate was 6.61 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.”  Further,

The leading cause of infant death in the United States in 2008 was congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities . . . accounting for 20 percent of all infant deaths. Disorders relating to short gestation and low birth weight, not elsewhere classified (low birth weight) was second, accounting for 17 percent of all infant deaths, followed by sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) accounting for 8 percent of infant deaths. The fourth and fifth leading causes in 2008 were newborn affected by maternal complications of pregnancy (maternal complications) (6 percent), and Accidents (unintentional injuries) (5 percent). Together the five leading causes accounted for 57 percent of all infant deaths in the US in 2008.

According to statistics complied in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “nationally estimated 1,560 children died from abuse and neglect in 2010. This translates to a rate of 2.07 children per 100,000 children in the general population and an average of four children dying every day from abuse or neglect," and according to the World Health Organization, world wide, “every year, there are an estimated 31,000 homicide deaths in children under 15.”  Finally, “this number underestimates the true extent of the problem, as a significant proportion of deaths due to child maltreatment are incorrectly attributed to falls, burns, drowning and other causes."  If we take the 31,000 figure as the yearly average of world wide child death attributable to abuse, neglect, and murder, then the singular “death by veganism” incidents that occurred in 2002, 2005, and 2008 constitute .0032 percent of that number for those years.  In 2001, when death by veganism spiked to a whopping twin instances, the percentage is .0065.

Regardless of these statistics, however, these cases and the media’s focus on the supposed vegan diet fed to these children by their parents generated overwhelming condemnation of the parents in these cases and of veganism in general as an unnatural and unhealthy lifestyle[iv] -- and it generated an abundance of articles condemning vegan mothers for breast feeding.  It is not my intention to prove or disprove the role that veganism played in the deaths of these children, nor do I want to expound on the extant data in support of a vegan diet as more health supportive than an omnivorous diet; my sense is that these cases are tragic and were caused by some combination of legitimate neglect and misinformation. 

My sense is that these children suffered horribly.  And my sense is that their parents have suffered horribly as well.  But what seems significant with regard to these particular cases is both the focus on the diets of the parents as “radical” (and, at least in some cases, the link between radical diet and radical religious beliefs), the role that that diet played in the way that these cases were investigated, reported, and punished, and the fact that the content of the mothers’ breast milk – in two of the cases – was of central importance.  Given the statistics above, and given the miniscule number of vegans in the global population at large, children of carnivorous and omnivorous parents die of malnutrition and neglect far more often than children of vegan parents, but the diet of the parents almost never makes headlines,[v] unless that diet deviates from what is considered the standard.[vi] 

Of the French death by veganism case, Mike Adams on NaturalNews.com chastises the “vegan police,” claiming that “if the ambulance had shown up and found a dead baby in a family whose cupboards were stuffed full of junk food and fast food -- sugary cereals, McDonald's food wrappers, frozen pizza, ice cream and donuts -- that would not have seemed suspicious at all.”  Adams’s position, while extreme (he goes so far as telling parents to lie about their veganism in order to protect their children), highlights the way that veganism is treated as anathema to appropriate parenting.  Adams addresses the breast milk issue as well:

be prepared to fight the State for your right to raise your baby on breast milk. The State . . . believes you're supposed to be feeding your baby processed "junk" infant formula made by powerful corporations. That infant formula, of course, contains . . . soy proteins extracted with the toxic solvent hexane. Even the DHA in many infant formula products is essentially "synthetic."

If you think a vegan woman's breast milk is dangerous, here's some more info about infant formula.

In a cultural moment in the United States marked by a childhood obesity epidemic, the product of a high calorie and high fat diet combined with limited exercise, there has been only one case where a parent has been charged with neglect for the morbid obesity of her child.  In 2009, Jerri Althea Gray was charged with neglecting her 14-year-old son, a child who, at that time, weighed 555 pounds.  Sherri F. Colb writes “the arrest of [the child’s] mother and his removal from her custody raise an important question. . . : Might it be child neglect simply to feed our children the Standard American Diet?”  It’s a significant question – and one to ponder – when the “Standard American Diet” consists of 35% fat.  Check out this New York Times feature that tracks the devolution of the Standard American Diet…which, of course, is S.A.D. 

And in our present political moment, we find ourselves in the midst of a media frenzy with regard to the Republican Party’s so-called war on women, a platform characterized by legislation aimed at limiting women’s access to both birth control and abortion and fueled by rhetoric that seeks to establish such entities as “legitimate” and “forcible” rape.[vii]  Simultaneously, we are experiencing a proliferation of popular cultural narratives that champion women’s ability to be bawdy and funny, to be sexual, and to be in control of their sexuality.[viii]  Given where we are, perhaps it’s time to consider how much of our cultural discourse represents veganism as a form of extreme and dangerous dietary control – and as an illegitimate choice that runs counter to the “standard American diet” – and how such representation factors into this broader political and social discussion. 

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[i] Their paper addresses Foucault’s concept of discourses, “recognizing them as ‘structured ways of knowing’ which become ‘institutionalized practices’” (136).

[ii] For a summation of these points, see John A. McDougall’s letter of response: http://www.drmcdougall.com/response_to_ny_times.htm

[iii] B12 is produced by bacteria, not by animals, but animal foods are the best source of B12.  However, it occurs naturally in nutritional yeast as well, and can be found in numerous vegan supplements. 

[iv] A google search on August 31, 2012 for “vegan baby death” pulls over four million hits.

[v] See my later discussion of Jerri Gray for the exception.

[vii] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/us/politics/rep-todd-akin-legitimate-rape-statement-and-reaction.html:

On August 19, 2012, KTVI-TV posted to its Web site an interview with Todd Akin, Republican representative for Missouri’s second congressional district, in which he was asked whether he believes abortion is justified in cases of rape.  He replied that rape does not result in pregnancy:“It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

[viii] I’m thinking, for example, of films like Bridesmaids (2011) and the HBO series Girls, which premiered in April of 2012.

Work Cited

Cole, Matthew and Karan Morgan.  “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspapers.”  British Journal of Sociology 62.1 (2011): 135-153. Print.

The Chik-fil-A LGBT Boycott Debate from a Vegan Perspective

“Anything we could do to the animals we could do to each other: we practiced on them first.” – Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

“[M]y vegetarianism is a great protest. And I dream that there may be a whole religion based on protest … against everything which is not just: about the fact that there is so much sickness, so much death, so much cruelty. My vegetarianism is my religion, and it's part of my protest against the conduct of the world.” –
Isaac Bashevis Singer

***

I remember Chik-fil-A from my childhood.  I loved those sandwiches – the buttered bread and the pickles.  Who knew that pickles tasted so good with chicken?  Those Chik-fil-A folks knew.  I remember my mother taking my sister and me to Chik-fil-A when we were out shopping, buying groceries or clothes to go back to school.  I remember her saying how she respected Chik-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy’s business stance never to be open on Sundays. 

I remember Chik-fil-A later, after I’d long since stopped eating animals, when it started its most successful advertizing campaign, the one with the cows begging for their lives, turning against their fellow creatures and urging us all to “eat mor chikin.”  And I remember my mother telling me then that she’d read a really compelling editorial in her local newspaper by a woman who claimed that this ad campaign made her a vegetarian because looking at those cows, anthropomorphized sentient beings who knew that they were going to be turned into corpses and served as food, gave her pause.  One thing that that campaign did, after all, was put an animal face on one kind of animal (the kind that ends up as burgers) that is rendered absent in the transition from animal to meat.  Note that there aren’t any chickens in Chik-fil-A’s ads; we’re only allowed, via the “eat mor chikin” visual to sympathize with the cows, to want to spare them their fate.  To depict chickens might make us attach a face to Chik-fil-A’s product, and such a move might compromise the sale of that product.

Here's a chicken.

It’s a brilliant ad campaign, calculating and divisive, asking that we care about one animal and eat another.  Such a position seems apt in the current calls to boycott Chik-fil-A, a position that requires us to demonstrate our support for one animal (LGBT human beings) by not eating another (chicken – at least chicken that comes from Chik-fil-A). 

You know the story: Dan Cathy, Chik-fil-A’s president, said the following to the Baptist Press:

“I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage . . . .  I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we would have the audacity to try to redefine what marriage is all about.”

"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."

And then a media shit storm ensued.

OK, so does Cathy have a right to his opinion about marriage?  Sure.  Does he have the right to state that opinion?  Well, sure again, but consider that he stated such an opinion in the context of his business, which muddies the water a bit.  The bigger issue, it seems to me, is whether Chik-fil-A actually discriminates against anyone as opposed to whether or not its president is a bonehead who believes

1.  That there is a god figure existing somewhere in the ether who created marriage, and

2.  That the bible is some divinely inspired text that enforces said god creature’s supposed heterosexist marital norm. 

You decide.  Here's Betty Bowers on the subject.

So on the point of Chik-fil-A and discrimination, I’m not sure.  Chik-fil-A has been sued for discrimination, but any idiot to sue anyone for pretty much any reason, so that’s not really evidence.

What I can tell – and I’m basing my position on a article called “The Cult of Chik-fil-A” in a recent edition of Forbes magazine – is that the company so closely screens who it hires – working to hire people in traditional marriages, for example – that it’s able to avoid litigation later. . . it discriminates before hiring to avoid being accused of discrimination after hiring. And here’s a Huffpo piece with some interesting info about Chik-fil-A and its business practices that casts some light on the issue. 

So boycott or not; it’s really up to you to decide what you want your money to support.  After all, much of what any of us buy is produced by corporations whose ethics we might find even more problematic than Chik-fil-A’s, if we knew what they were.  Perhaps Cathy’s biggest error was simply opening his mouth in the first place.

Valid question.

Several days ago, I posted on Facebook that I would boycott Chik-fil-A over its LGBT stance, if I hadn’t already boycotted it ages ago over its chicken stance, and this whole mess has me thinking about the way oppression works, particularly as the focal point of this human rights argument is a place that serves dead animals.  In nothing that I’ve read about the Chik-fil-A debacle has anyone recognized or said anything about the interconnectedness of kinds of oppression; that is, no one has considered that the oppression of certain groups of a people – in this case, LGBT people – and the oppression of animals might be somehow related, or that one might be foundational to the other. 

Let me back up for a second. 

The ecofeminist position holds that oppressions are linked and that we can’t get past any of them unless we recognize that linkage and stop perpetuating it.  I’ve argued elsewhere that there’s a kind of primary binary opposition at work in such thinking, the binary that allows us to distinguish animal from human, that in othering animals to the extent that we can do things like factory farm them and experiment on them, we are then capable of shifting that thinking in order to dehumanize certain groups of people.  In any binary system of thought, one part of the duality is perceived and treated as inferior.  So if we think of animals as less deserving of rights than humans, when we rhetorically animalize humans – think of Barbara Espinosa calling Obama a monkey – such rhetorical action can lead to such literal actions as, oh, I don’t know, the Nazis killing the Jews with rat poisoning.

As a caveat, I realize that this thinking might in and of itself be hugely flawed, and that such a position could seem to indicate that I think that speciesism, if it is foundational, then becomes the most important ism out there, that it has to be undone first so that the undoing of all other isms can follow.  That’s not how I feel at all.  Nonetheless, my belief is that we’ll continue to perpetuate oppression(s) until we are able to stop compartmentalizing them – and when the universe so conveniently hands me something as blatant as this Chik-fil-A business, I have to start with the animal issue, since no one else seems to be doing it.

In a 2007 article by Jasmin Singer in the online publication SATYA called “Coming Out for Animal Rights: LGBTQ Animal Advocates Make the Connection,” Singer says

There are so many correlations between animal and gay rights—advocacy and activism, mainstream acceptance and prejudice, community and pride, legislation and politics, and, of course, the countless personal stories of coming out as vegan and queer in a world where the majority of people see both as radical and aberrant choices. In a country where mainstream media bats a blind eye at Butterball workers who punch and stomp on live turkeys until their skulls explode, and practically ignore gay hate crimes such as the brutal stabbing of teenager Sakia Gunn, the question should not be, “What is the connection?” but rather, “What is the difference?”

If the brouhaha over Chik-fil-A doesn’t draw such sentiment into sharp relief, then I don’t know what does.  As the cows say, “eat mor tofu!”