How sad is it that we have to fact-check the fact-checkers? Unfortunately, though, many ostensibly neutral fact-checkers have become too obviously infected by liberal bias for us to take them at their word.
Snopes is the latest fact-checker to do its readers a massive disservice. This time, their dereliction of duty concerns the smearing of Chick-fil-A. The story here is an audacious liberal hoax that accused the delicious fast food chain of supporting anti-gay death penalty laws in Uganda.
Here’s how this all started.
A high-ranking Ugandan government official recently announced support for instituting the death penalty to punish homosexual acts. This sparked an international outcry and widespread condemnation. However, it’s not actually clear that this brutal law will be implemented. Other government officials have contradicted the official’s account, and it’s unclear whether the anti-gay bill set to be introduced will actually include the death penalty or not.
So, the institution of the anti-gay Ugandan death penalty law in question might not even be happening. But this ugly situation nonetheless offered liberal trolls an opportunity to smear a delicious chicken-cooking company that dared to also be Christian.
Here’s an example of one post spreading the viral hoax:
Today Uganda announced a bill to legalize murdering gay people. National Christian Organization paid a preacher to go to Uganda and help their lawmakers with the bill. Chick-fil-a funds National Christian Org.
If you eat at Chick-fil-a, this is what your money goes to.
— slop (@sloppyposts) October 12, 2019
It was also shared on the leftist Facebook page The Other 98%, which has over six million followers.
These false posts literally claimed that Chick-fil-A had financially supported these laws, and, unfortunately, thousands if not millions of people were taken in by this hoax, spreading the fake news widely across social media. And what did our trustworthy fact-checkers at Snopes do? They rated the bogus claim’s truthfulness “mixed.”
Here’s how hard they stretched the truth.
Chick-fil-A’s only connection to any of this is that its owners — not the company — through their separate foundation donate to the National Christian Foundation, the 8th-largest nonprofit in the U.S. That foundation works with Christian charitable groups. And there’s a weak connection between a tiny percentage of the groups NCF works with and anti-LGBT ministers in Uganda. Yet connecting those groups to ministers does not connect them to this legislation. Even Snopes admits “it’s not clear to what extent National Christian Foundation-funded entities were involved in the creation or promotion of a bill to make homosexuality punishable by death.”
So the truthfulness of the progressive claims that Chick-fil-A “funded” these laws is not “mixed.” It’s completely nonexistent.
The company is not responsible in any way, shape, or form for that fact that a separate foundation its owners fund donates to a nonprofit of which 1% or less of its work has some tenuous connection to Uganda — where an anti-LGBT death penalty law may or may not even be happening. Indeed, a Chick-fil-A spokesperson told me that “Chick-fil-A has not supported legislative campaigns of any kind in Uganda.”
Then again, perhaps it shouldn’t really be a surprise that Snopes botched this one so badly. This is the same outlet that “fact-checks” clearly-marked conservative parody sites such as the Babylon Bee and sometimes labels blatantly false liberal propaganda as true in spirit.
But Snopes has got to do better. It’s just not fair to let a company like Chick-fil-A be smeared by fake internet rumors, even if you disagree with their Christian stances and values. If our “fact checkers” can’t even acknowledge that, they’re good for absolutely nothing at all.
