Chick-Fil-A Restaurant Sponsoring Gay Pride Festival

Amidst the dispute over the Chick-fil-A fast food chain’s support for traditional marriage, a New Hampshire Chick-fil-A restaurant is lending its support to the state’s gay pride event.

In a development revealed by The Daily Caller, the state’s only Chick-fil-A store located in Nashua is sponsoring the August 11 New Hampshire Pride Fest, a celebration of gay rights.

In a statement on the Pride Fest website, restaurant owner/manager Anthony Picolia said, in part:

Chick-fil-A at Pheasant Lane Mall has gay employees and serves gay customers with honor, dignity and respect. We also don’t discriminate in giving back to the Nashua community, donating to a wide variety of causes. I would challenge people to come have a conversation with me before they make assumptions or boycott my restaurant. Come to my restaurant and see for yourself that my team and I only have one mission: To serve exceptional experiences to all

On the website, Pride Fest organizer Tara Powell noted that “This sponsorship is just another example of how great New Hampshire is to the LGBT community. We are looking forward to having a great Pride Fest, and are very excited to have Chick-fil-A involved.”

Separately, another prominent liberal has defended Chick-fil-A’s free speech rights under the First Amendment in the marriage controversy.

In an interview with Newsmax, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, a same sex marriage supporter, insisted that the big-city politicians who want to shut down store franchises because of the corporate policy are engaging in “terrible intolerance” and that “state-sponsored discrimination based on pure ideology in expression of religious views…is unconstitutional.”

The marketplace of ideas must remain open and the marketplace for chicken must remain open, and let people decide to buy their chicken either on the quality of the chicken or on the ideas of the owner of the chicken company.

But the state has no role to play in picking and choosing one ideology over the other.

Prof. Dershowitz added that stockholders can sue the company if they believe that executives are undermining the balance sheet by pursuing a religious agenda.

Dershowitz also noted that despite the views of the CEO when it comes to marriage, “There is no evidence that the company itself discriminates against gays, either in hiring or firing or who it will serve or how it will treat gay people when they walk through the door.”