Chick-fil-A donated another $1.8 million to anti-LGBTQ groups
Earlier this year they were caught giving money to anti-LGBTQ organizations.
And new tax documents show even more donations.
By Alex Bollinger Thursday, December 12, 2019
Documents show that Chick-fil-A donated to anti-LGBTQ organizations in 2018, a year after its 2017 donations, which came to light earlier this year.
This past March, the Chick-fil-A Foundation’s tax returns showed that the organization had donated $1.8 million to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), the Salvation Army, and the Paul Anderson Youth Home in 2017, years after Chick-fil-A said that they would stop donating to anti-LGBTQ organizations.
Now tax returns from 2018 show that donations to the FCA and the Salvation Army continued. The 990 says that Chick-fil-A made two donations of $825,000 to the FCA and one donation of $115,000 to the Salvation Army in Atlanta, for a total of $1.8 million.
No donations were made to the Paul Anderson Youth Home in 2018, which said in the past that the “homosexual behavior and lifestyle” are “evil.”
After the 2017 donations got media attention earlier this year, the fast food chain faced backlash. Airports and colleges rejecting contracts with Chick-fil-A and people protested as the chicken restaurant tried to expand to Canada and the U.K., while the right made Chick-fil-A a symbol of their fight against LGBTQ rights.
Last month, Chick-fil-A announced a new system for determining the organizations that it would donate to through its foundation. Junior Achievement USA and the Covenant House International were both prominently featured in their press release, while the FCA and Salvation Army were both missing.
“There’s no question we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” said Chick-fil-A President and Chief Operating Officer Tim Tassopoulos. “There are lots of articles and newscasts about Chick-fil-A, and we thought we needed to be clear about our message.”
He said that Chick-fil-A had made a multi-year commitment to some organizations that continued to get money, and Tassopoulos later told Vice, “No organization will be excluded from future consideration – faith-based or non-faith-based.”
The FCA, an organization founded to spread Christianity through sports that has been accused of encouraging public school coaches to proselytize to athletes, has a “sexual purity statement” that leaders are supposed to follow.
The statement says that marriage is “a covenant between one man and one woman,” that “God intends sexual intimacy to occur only between a man and a woman,” and that “each person’s gender is determined by biological sex instead of one’s self-perception.”
The FCA’s Statement of Faith also says that marriage is “between one man and one woman as the foundation of the family and the basic structure of human society.”
The Salvation Army has a history of opposing civil rights legislation for LGBTQ people and has discriminated against transgender people on multiple occasions.
There is no way of knowing if Chick-fil-A learned how to quit these groups until its foundation’s tax returns for 2019 are released next year.
