[Crossposted at Family Scholars Blog.]
David Blankenhorn writes:
Recently in the New York Times, the reporter Kim Severson writes that Chick-fil-A, the Atlanta-based fast food company, “has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to national groups fighting same-sex marriage.”
I can’t speak with certainty, but I am fairly sure that this statement is untrue.
Chick-Fil-A has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the National Christian Foundation (NCF), a national group.
NCF, among other activities, gives huge gobs of money to national groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. Although those groups do have other activities, opposing SSM is a major part of their agenda.
So the question is, does Chick-Fil-A’s indirect donation to anti-SSM groups count as having “given hundreds of thousands of dollars to national groups fighting same-sex marriage”?
For the purpose of an article in the Times, I’d say it does not count. Newspapers are supposed to be painstakingly accurate in their language choices. Instead, the phrasing they used could give a false impression that Chick-Fil-A has directly donated money to groups like the Family Research Council.
David ventures two guesses for why the Times writer wrote what she did (she just said it for fun, or she considers all moneys donated not in support of SSM to be anti-SSM). He didn’t mention the most obvious possibility: Maybe she made a good-faith mistake. It’s not impossible for a reporter on a deadline to mix up “donates to a group that donates to anti-SSM groups” and “donates to anti-SSM groups,” especially since Chick-Fil-A was a minor aside in the article, not the main point of the article.
But on the other hand… Maybe the Times article was right after all.
What if the folks running the NCF are consciously anti-SSM, and deliberately include groups fighting SSM among the groups they donate to, as a way of supporting the anti-SSM cause? In that case, the NCF is a national group that’s fighting SSM. And Chick-Fil-A donated over $600,000 to them.
So I’m tentatively in agreement with David — the Times description seems inaccurate. But I might change my mind if I get more information about the NCF.
* * *
Speaking as someone who (very) occasionally buys fast food — I won’t buy from Chick-Fil-A again.
It’s not just the donations — although that alone is enough. (Donating to a group that donates to anti-gay groups isn’t acceptable behavior for any corporation that wants my business. Importantly, this isn’t something that Chick-Fil-A’s owners do with their own personal income; from what I can make it, it’s something Chick-Fil-A does with its corporate income.)
But I’m more bothered by the policies described in an article in Forbes (quoted here):
Loyalty to the company isn’t the only thing that matters to Cathy, who wants married workers, believing they are more industrious and productive. One in three company operators have attended Christian-based relationship-building retreats through WinShape at Berry College in Mount Berry, Ga. The programs include classes on conflict resolution and communication. Family members of prospective operators–children, even–are frequently interviewed so Cathy and his family can learn more about job candidates and their relationships at home.
1) I don’t think discrimination against unmarried workers is acceptable.
2) An employer interviewing the children of job applicants is just plain creepy.
3) This policy almost certainly creates de facto discrimination against job applicants in same-sex relationships.
I think the writer might have inadvertently conflated Chik-Fil-A’s donations to anti-SSM groups (such as Serving Marriages, Inc., Focus on the Family and the Alliance Defense Fund) with the donations they give to NCF. I believe it’s their direct donations to these other groups (all of which have defeating SSM as part of their agendas) that make the phrase “given hundreds of thousands of dollars to national groups fighting same-sex marriage” accurate if not exactly clear in the article.
Maybe she made a good-faith mistake. It’s not impossible for a reporter on a deadline to mix up “donates to a group that donates to anti-SSM groups” and “donates to anti-SSM groups,
Perhaps she did. But there once was a time when newspapers employed fact-checkers and editors to catch such things. Are there no longer people employed at those jobs at the New York Times?
@ RonF … probably not. Where I work, we don’t even have copy editors anymore. And fact-checkers have always been more of a magazine thing, where they have much longer lead-times to publication.
Amp – Note that “operators” are not job applicants. Operators are franchisees. I agree it would be rather weird to interview the children of people you were hiring to run the fry cooker; checking on the family life of people you’re going into business with (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars) is significantly less weird, particularly when they’re pretty clear that it’s stability that they’re looking for.
please. the company that explicitly says in its mission statement that it stays closed on Sundays SO THAT its employees can attend church?
with that as preamble you couldn’t expect anything else!
Interesting post. However, I think you meant to include a “not” in here:
[Thanks! I’ve now fixed the error. –Amp]
Heh. Amp, I was wondering about that.
Inquiring into the stability of the family life of someone you’re going into business with makes sense to me, but I’d draw the line at interviewing minors.
So – there’s no such thing as a copy editor at the NYT? They publish whatever the reporter sends in?
RonF … I don’t work at the NYT! I’m sure they still have copy editors. But a copy editor is not going to catch a mistake like this. Copy editors look for grammar, punctuation, internal consistency, basic logic, easily verifiable facts, maybe simple math, like whether the percentages used in an article make sense. At some papers, copy editors are empowered to raise questions about the basic fairness and underlying assumptions in an article.
But to have accurate information about Chick-Fil-A’s contributions, you would need to have access to the documents/interview notes of the reporter. Editors cannot be responsible for re-reporting an entire article. At a certain point, yes, they have to trust the reporter.
I would be surprised if there were line-by-line fact-checking of a daily news article, even at the NYT (not talking big investigative pieces, Sunday mag pieces). There never has been at most newspapers.
And to add to what chingona stated, Ron, as I pointed out in my first comment, the reporter’s statement was factually true. So a neither a copy editor nor a fact-checker is going to catch what simply seems to be an awkwardly-phrased sentence.
Bear, I think you’re right, that may be the source of the mix-up.
However, the statement is still inaccurate, since their direct donations to those groups don’t even total a single hundred thousand dollars.
I think it’s the equivalent of describing a large donation to Planned Parenthood “as hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups that perform abortions. ”
Which, well, PP does perform abortions. But that’s just one thing they do!
I think you can parse it such that you can support a claim that it’s accurate, but it leaves people with a false or, at best, misleading impression. It probably would have been better if it said “to Christian groups whose work includes fighting same-sex marriage” (if they had to squeeze it into one clause).
So chingona, it seems that a) NYT reporters can’t be trusted, and b) the paper doesn’t do anything about it.
Reporters should report, not editorialize.
The fact is that Chick-Fil-A donates money to a conservative organization that in turn donates to various organizations, including some who support the preservation of the traditional definition of marriage among other things that they do. Amp and others here are debating whether or not that’s equivalent to Chick-Fil-A directly supporting such a thing.
My point is that the reporter should report the facts. The debate as to whether one is equivalent to another belongs to us, not to the reporter. To do otherwise is to substitute the reporter’s opinion for the facts.
Ron, do you ever make a mistake?
He thought he did, once, but he turned out to be in error.
Grace
The more I think about this, the more I want to double-down on a certain point: Language is fundamentally political. We can say up and down that newspapers should just report the facts, but there is no way to get around the fact that language is political. When someone describes marriage between one man and one woman as “traditional,” that is political. When someone describes water-boarding as torture, that is political, but it also is political when it is NOT called torture. When we call people attacking American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan terrorists or insurgents or combatants, all of that is political. There is simply no way around that because we have to communicate and the words we use to communicate have, well, meaning.
In this particular case, I think the reporter could have phrased things in a more accurate way (especially because this is not a hill worth dying on) and the simplest explanation is that she was writing quickly (yes, newspapers have an obligation to be careful about their word choice, but with as much content as we put out in as little time, frankly, it’s amazing that we’re as accurate as we are). But if she had written “that Chick-Fil-A donates money to a conservative organization that in turn donates to various organizations, including some who support the preservation of the traditional definition of marriage among other things that they do” that would also have been “editorializing” because describing it as “the preservation of the traditional definition of marriage” is also political.
Yes, I have. And I expect to do so in the future. But when I do I follow the advice I gave my son when he took his first professional job: “Own your mistakes.” Tell people you made a mistake and then do what you can to fix it. Don’t deny you made a mistake and don’t try to mask it or cover it up. Because if you do that, after your mistake is uncovered no one will ever trust your word again.
If the NYT came out and said “Hey, we mixed editorializing and fact reporting together” then fine. Everyone makes mistakes. But my guess here is that the NYT will deny they made a mistake in the first place and try parsing it out instead. It’s a fair question whether or not the NYT sees mixing editoralizing and fact reporting as a mistake.
Language is fundamentally political.
I disagree. It can be used politically, certainly. “Pro-life” vs. “anti-abortion”, “progressive” vs. “left-wing”, etc. But it seems to me that you are arguing that there is no way to create an objective report of facts.
When someone describes marriage between one man and one woman as “traditional,” that is political.
Marriage from antiquity to the present day has (with insignificant exceptions) involved couples comprised of disparate sexes. “Tradition” is a useful shorthand to indicate this. Given that proponents of same-sex marriage wish to change millenia of history, how would you differentiate between the current state and the state that such a change represents? Or is it your proposition that referencing the existence of such history is political?
I guess that’s true if “insignificant” means “a great many.”
This isn’t true.
You have been presented with evidence, over and over again that it isn’t true.
Therefore, you know it isn’t true.
I can only conclude that you are deliberately making an untrue statement.
So when you say,
Well … I guess that’s not true either.
—Myca
Oh, and:
Holy shit time machines omg liberals want to change history.
Oh you meant progress? Something which changes the present and the future but leaves the past alone?
Yeah, I guess it’s true that we’re in favor of that. Good point.
—Myca
I apologize for if this seems like quibbling, but I actually think Ron’s statement isn’t completely unfair, allowing for cultural variation in definition and determination of “sex.” Most of the examples of socially sanctioned “same-sex” marriages* that I have encountered in my reading are actually examples of different ways of determining sex/gender categories. For example, Two-Spirit People by Sue-Ellen Jacobs et al notes that many people mistakenly assume that traditional two-spirit folks were “gay” and formed relationships with one another, when in most cases this was taboo, and the people we now call two-spirit usually married a person of a different, complementary gender.
I bring this up only because the subsuming of all historical gender diversity under Western 20th century gay identity is a giant pet peeve of mine. I don’t think this should have any bearing on the legality or morality of same-sex marriage today.
* As distinct from the countless examples of socially sanctioned, non-marriage forms of same-sex sexual behavior and relationships.
Ron,
The mistake wasn’t mixing editorializing and reporting. It was either a possible factual error or a poor word choice. I once wrote that someone was hit by a moving van. It wasn’t a van used for moving (which was what all the readers understood). It was a van in motion. That wasn’t editorializing. It was a poor word choice. I once wrote that pikas were rodents (and boy did I hear about that one). That wasn’t editorializing. That was a factual error.
There is no opinion expressed in the sentence we are debating.
You appear obsessed with the idea that this was done on purpose to make Chick-Fil-A look bad. I suspect you won’t believe me, but really and truly, the number of reporters that would intentionally insert a factual error on purpose for some political end is vanishingly small. I am sure they exist, but I have never met one or worked with one. We just … mess up sometimes. Not mess up as in fail to resist the urge to editorialize. Mess up as in mess up. Forget to double check something. Don’t realize that what we think we know just ain’t so. Fail to think about the alternative interpretation of the words we used. Mess up.
Interestingly, it does not appear that Chick-Fil-A has asked for a correction. Maybe they think it’s essentially accurate. They gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups and the groups they gave the money to fight gay marriage.
Historically, almost all cultures have had a religious conception that involved multiple deities.
Therefore, monotheism should be illegal.
I suppose, in theory, you could have an objective SET of facts. We might call it the Universe. However, the instant you start to describe them, using language, you have committed a political act. You may not know it or intend it, but you have. Word choices reflect beliefs and world view, and those are political. And there’s no such thing as a perfect synonym.
Go ahead and describe something, and then anyone who wants to can point out political choices in your description. Fun party game!
Grace
Shalom, I agree that two-spirit people’s relationships were not exactly what we would today call same sex marriage. The two-spirit folk included all manner of identities that we’d call everything from ‘genderqueer’ to ‘transgendered’ to, yeah, ‘gay’ today, probably.
They were, however, unquestionably same-sex relationships, though not necessarily same-gender ones.
Additionally, there’s this thing that happens when we talk about historic same sex committed relationships, which is that people start pulling all kinds of magic reasons out of their ass that historic same sex committed relationships aren’t the same as what we’d call marriage.
And I agree. They’re not. But also, you know what?
Historic opposite sex committed relationships aren’t the same as what we’d call marriage.
The form romantic commitment takes varies from culture to culture and across time. If people want to apply a consistent standard as to what is and isn’t a marriage, then they have to apply it to heterosexual as well as homosexual pairings. But oddly, they never do. They One True Scotsman same sex marriage to fit their ideological goals … or, sometimes, just repeat lies and hope nobody will call them on it.
Mandolin says some smart stuff in this regard here, and I expand on it a bit here, here, and here.
—Myca
Also, not yet pointed out, the couples part of Ron’s claim is also demonstrably wrong.
I hate Tumblr, but this infographic (click it to enlarge) is very enlightening about traditional Biblical marriage.
Myca,
Is a relationship today between a trans woman and a cis man “unquestionably a same-sex relationship, though not necessarily a same-gender one”? [ETA: Just want to clarify that I don’t think Western trans folks today are the same as two-spirit folks, either — just that the logic of using one form of assigned sex to trump social, lived, and identified gender, in order to construe a relationship as same-sex, is the same.]
I completely agree that heterosexual marriage varies widely culturally and historically, and that an unreasonable onus is sometimes placed on SSM advocates to find perfect examples of SSM in history, when of course no such onus is placed on anti-SSMers. But I don’t think it’s ok to erase transgender histories, or to impose Western sex/gender categories on to other cultures,* in service of SSM advocacy.
For the record, I also don’t think historical SSM is necessary for recognition of SSM today; it’s a simple matter of equality, which harms no one.
* This brings me back to your sentence, “unquestionably same-sex relationships.” Our ways of assigning sex, like gender, have their own arbitrary conventions and inconsistencies; they are not more true or accurate than another culture’s.
On reflection, Shalom, I think I agree with you that “unquestionably same-sex relationships” is a problematic way of putting it, because almost certainly many of these relationships, had they existed modern day, would have involved people who identified as trans-. With that in mind, I hereby withdraw the sentence.
Where I do want to push back a little, though is when you say:
I agree with this, but I think it cuts both ways. I don’t think it’s okay to lump all two-spirit people together under “SSM,” but I also don’t think it’s okay to lump them all together under, “transgendered.” If we consider both traits to be genetically inborn, then it’s almost certain that both transgendered folks and gay folks existed in native cultures, and that ‘Two-Spirit’ was a catch-all for both. A lot of the things I’ve read have sort of considered them a third gender. I guess my point is that it’s different. It’s not easily reducible to modern categories in either sense.
I do know that the modern day revivals of the Two-Spirit traditions among native communities have tended to include both gay and transgendered individuals.
With all that in mind, I think what I should have said was something more like “Two spirit relationships almost certainly included what we would call same-sex relationships as well as differing-sex ones.”
—Myca
When I raised the issue of the term “traditional marriage,” I had in mind both polygamy and marriage as a property arrangement. Any use of the word “traditional” is political because you can go back as near or as far as is convenient for your argument, yet project a sense of “things have always been this way.”
I wasn’t so much referring to previous relationship institutions between people of the same sex and/or gender. (Not that that isn’t work talking about. Just clarifying.)
Myca, that’s fair. Thanks for the withdrawal; I’m totally on board with your revised sentence.