College faculty chair compares Chick-fil-A to 'pornography' as academic senate votes to kick restaurant off campus

The vice chair of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's academic senate likened popular fast-food chain Chick-fil-A to "pornography" as...

The vice chair of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's academic senate likened popular fast-food chain Chick-fil-A to "pornography" as the faculty body voted overwhelmingly to kick the restaurant off campus after 25 years, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

"We don't sell pornography in the bookstore, and we don't have a Hooters on campus — we already pre-select those kind of things based on our existing values," Thomas Gutierrez told student publication Mustang News. "This is a similar thing. The difference is we're actually profiting from this. So our money, every dollar a student is spending at Chick-fil-A, is going to these causes that are in violation of our values."

Mustang News — citing left-wing outfit Think Progress — said the "Chick-fil-A Foundation donated more than $1.8 million to groups with a history of anti-LGBTQ discrimination in 2017."

The Tuesday vote to oust Chick-fil-A was a landslide of sorts, with 38 of 44 academic senators wanting to get rid of the restaurant, the Chronicle said.

What did the school administration have to say?

Despite the demands of the faculty representatives, it doesn't appear Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is in any rush to bow to them.

"While university administration passionately disagrees with the values of some of the organizations the president of Chick-fil-A has chosen to make personal donations to, we do not believe in responding to intolerance with intolerance," university spokesman Matt Lazier told KSBY-TV. "Rather, we must model our values of inclusion — that means upholding the rights of others to have different perspectives and ensuring there is space in our community for differing viewpoints and ideologies, even those that may be in direct conflict with our own."

The school and Chick-fil-A signed a 5-year contract extension in 2018.

Despite attacks, Chick-fil-A just keeps forging ahead

Chick-fil-A has been enduring left-wing attacks for years. But it seems that as the punches increase in number and intensity, the success of the franchise just keeps increasing: To wit, Chick-fil-A just became the third-largest restaurant chain in America, behind McDonald's and Starbucks.

But some folks are nevertheless doing their darndest to keep Chick-fil-A down:

• Pittsburgh's school board last October barred district employees and its schools from officially participating in a kids' run sponsored by Chick-fil-A due to support of traditional marriage at the restaurant's corporate level.
• New Jersey's Rider University last November barred the restaurant from coming on campus because its "corporate values have not sufficiently progressed enough to align with those of Rider."
• A college student environmental group in January referred to Chick-fil-A as a "white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist" cult and demanded that the University of Georgia ban it.
• The city of San Antonio in March banned Chick-fil-A from its airportover the restaurant's "legacy of anti-LGBTQ" behaviors, and the Buffalo Niagara International Airport pulled a similar move just days later.
• An angry San Jose City Council placed LGBTQ flags all around the city's airport — where a Chick-fil-A is opening this month — in hopes of making it the "gayest Chick-fil-A in the country," according to one member, to rail against the restaurant's supposed "anti-LGBT stance."

Push to remove Chick-fil-A from Cal Poly campus gains momentum with faculty vote