The mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, made headlines the other day by declaring that the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain would not be welcome in his city because the support for traditional marriage expressed by its CEO, Dan Cathy, was inconsistent with ???Chicago values.???
On Thursday, the Chicago Sun-Times reported: ???Ignoring Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan???s history of anti-Semitic remarks, Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday welcomed the army of men dispatched to the streets by Farrakhan to stop the violence in Chicago neighborhoods.???
Emanuel explained that ???people of faith and community leaders have a role to play in helping to protect our neighborhoods and our citizens.??? He praised Farrakhan???s Nation of Islam for deciding to ???help protect the community.???
Now, besides being one of America???s pre-eminent anti-Semitic bigots, Louis Farrakhan is at least as opposed to gay marriage as the CEO of Chick-fil-A. When President Obama formally abandoned his phony, politically convenient support for traditional marriage a few months ago, Farrakhan railed that he was ???the first President that sanctioned what the Scriptures forbid.???
He thought that Newsweek???s hagiographic cover of Obama with a rainbow halo, declaring him ???The First Gay President,??? was meant to mock Obama, rather than praise him. Sodom and Gomorrah were name-checked, and the Koran???s disapproving words about ???males coming to males with lust in their hearts as they should to a female??? were quoted:
Farrakhan took pains to insist that his opposition to gay marriage did not equate to personal hatred of gay people - a sentiment the Chicago mayor appears unwilling to entertain from the president of Chick-fil-A. Furthermore, Farrakhan is hardly a figure of ???tolerance??? in general. He???s far more ???divisive??? than anything Dan Cathy has ever supported.
There???s nothing complicated about the mind-boggling hypocrisy on display here: Rahm Emanuel has comprehensively failed in his duties to the people of Chicago. He has little choice but to embrace Farrakhan, because those Nation of Islam patrols are one of the few things that seem to be helping with the violence on Chicago???s ostensibly ???gun-free??? streets. Generations of one-party misrule have squandered public resources on a great many things besides police protection for the citizens, and now Emanuel finds himself compelled to accept whatever alternatives to anarchy are offered. Condemning Chick-fil-A is easy, and cheap, while condemnation of Farrakhan is a luxury this degenerate political administration cannot afford.
A failed mayor like Emanuel should be humble in the face of his disgrace, not a blustery proto-fascist who declares rigid ideological conditions for doing business in his city??? while he grins and does business with someone who manifestly fails to meet those conditions. There is a great city beneath the blood and corruption of Chicago, but its people will need to turn away from the likes of Emanuel and Farrakhan to find it. Freedom withers in many ways under the influence of bad government. The freedom of speech and religion are no exception.
