A top executive at popular fast-food restaurant Chick-fil-A responded to the recent wave of bans from airports and college campuses and renewed calls for a boycotts because of its charitable foundation’s donations to faith-based groups.
In an interview with Business Insider, Rodney Bullard, executive director for the Chick-fil-A Foundation, said their mission of helping the community outweighs the outrage of pro-LGBT groups over contributions to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army. Chick-fil-A gave $1,653,416 to the fellowship and $150,000 to the Salvation Army in 2017, according to tax filings released earlier this year.
“The calling for us is to ensure that we are relevant and impactful in the community, and that we’re helping children and that we’re helping them to be everything that they can be,” Bullard said.
“For us, that’s a much higher calling than any political or cultural war that’s being waged,” he said. “This is really about an authentic problem that is on the ground, that is present and ever present in the lives of many children who can’t help themselves.”
Bullard defended the donations to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, noting that while the company’s leadership does not believe in gay marriage, the money goes to the fellowship’s summer camp, which focuses on helping low-income youth.
Carrie Kurlander, Chick-fil-A’s vice president of external communications, told Business Insider that their goal is not about having these kids live their lives according to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes code.
“The intent is to expose them to all of the gateway to college exposure in sports as role models, all of that,” Kurlander said. “So, we actually had a conversation two years ago about this very thing and said, ‘Alright, we’re probably going to get dinged. But the impact is real and authentic.’ And so, there was a judgment call.”
The interview comes after the cities of San Antonio and Buffalo banned Chick-fil-A from their airports, citing their donations and founder’s view of same-sex marriage. Most recently, some students and faculty at Trinity University and California Polytechnic State University have called for the restaurant to be removed from the campuses.
Officials at each school have denied the requests. Matt Lazier, spokesman for California Polytechnic State, said removing Chick-fil-A would be a “form of censorship and intolerance.”
[Related: Pete Buttigieg, a fan of Chick-fil-A chicken]
