Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Cartoons




                In this sketch, cartoonist Jimmy Margulies portrays the discrimination against homosexuals in Chick-fil-A by drawing a parallel between gay discrimination and color discrimination in the South prior to the mid-twentieth century. Chick-fil-A was founded by a traditional Christian man who wanted to incorporate his religion into the way his business was conducted. Thus, every restaurant in the massive fast food chain is closed on Sundays, and the employees have the liberty to turn away a homosexual customer. The drinking fountain labelled “straight” is drawn to be of much higher quality than the drinking fountain designated for homosexuals as a method to represent the underlying inequality and harshly correlate it with racial discrimination. Some critics believe this to be too harsh of a comparison, because the discrimination through the twentieth century was much crueler than the inequality faced today with homosexuals. Others, particularly in the gay community, applaud this cartoon for directly victimizing Chick-fil-A. It came to my attention that many gay individuals boycott eating at the restaurant as a way of protest and put economic pressure on the company to change. Like all political cartoons, there are a wide array of reactions to this drawing.

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