Are there any gay chickens in this debate?

And yet, there are times when religion and politics intersect in the public square in a way that can’t be avoided. Such is the brouhaha over Atlanta based Chick-fil-A owner Dan Cathy’s comments concerning “the biblical definition of the family unit.”

What Cathy said really wasn’t news. He and his family have long given voice to that view and have supported causes that they believe support Christian values.

So his support of “traditional” marriage as opposed to gay marriage should have been no shock. In his recent comments, he didn’t directly mention the gay marriage debate, or comment in any negative way about gay people. Nor does Chick-fil-A as a corporation practice anti-gay discrimination in hiring or in what customers it serves.

Still, because of the ongoing national debate over the rights of gay couples and the influence of social media, Cathy’s comments took on a life of their own. He was accused of gay bashing and of being some kind of right-wing nut.

All of that might have just been a blip, however, had it not been for the reaction of several mayors from big cities. From Boston to Chicago to San Francisco, liberal mayors issued statements threatening to ban Chick-fil-A stores from their towns because of Cathy’s beliefs.

Think about that. Here are leading elected officials threatening to use the power of their governments to ban a legal business from their communities because of the personal religious beliefs of the business’ owner.

But consider what would have happened if the reverse had been true. What if Cathy had been vocally pro-gay and a conservative mayor from a major city had threatened to ban his firm from the town. The backlash would have been enormous; every liberal group in the country would have demanded the mayor’s head for trying to violate the Constitutional rights of a business leader and his company.

It’s interesting to note that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently gave $2.5 million to promote a pro-gay marriage amendment in Washington State, yet no conservative elected official has threatened to undermine his business.

Perhaps this situation has revealed exactly what so many conservatives have said for years — that given the chance, liberals would use the power of government to suppress the rights of those they disagree with. Although conservatives have the reputation for trampling on individual and religious rights, liberals are just as much, if not more intolerant of those who don’t share their beliefs.

This fracas comes amid one of the country’s most important presidential elections in the last 40 years. That election is nominally between President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, but those are just the figureheads. The real election is between those who believe that government power should be the dominant political, economic and moral arbitrator in American culture (Obama); and those who believe that the private sector and individual effort should be the dominant forces (Romney.) This is a fundamental struggle that has been going on for decades, but it is coming to a head in this election.

The debate over gay marriage straddles that divide in some odd ways. On the one hand, liberals threaten to use the power of government in illegal ways to punish those they disagree with, making liberals the ultimate hypocrites — how can someone who demands tolerance of others themselves display such a crass intolerance?

But conservatives have it no better. If conservatives truly do believe in the rights of individuals to have freedom to choose, how can they denounce extending legal rights to those who choose an “alternative” family arrangement?

The other dynamic that makes this issue such a hot topic is that more than many other public debates, the topic of gay marriage has religious and legal strands that are tightly interwoven. Marriage is both a private religious act and a public legal contract. Religious traditions of all stripes involve some kind of marriage ceremony. That has been true for centuries in all parts of the world.

But those religious traditions don’t end at the temple door. From those beliefs grew the civil laws that govern the public nature of marriage as a legal contract.

In most cultures, the most fundamental belief is that marriage is between a man and a woman and not all the other possible combinations. That’s because marriage has historically been seen as the formal structure through which there is procreation, child rearing and the survival of the species.

Many liberals now reject that view, but it is also an inconvenient position for conservatives. It is difficult to argue in a legal sense that a contract between John and Suzie should carry more benefits than a legal contract between John and Sam.

Yet liberals also have problems; if John and Sam are OK, then why not John, Suzie and Sam? Where is the line in the legal arena that defines the structure of a family unit?

Dan Cathy has the right to speak about his religious beliefs in public and should be free to do so without having to fear the kind of reprisals, threats or harassment from government that he got from several liberal mayors. His right to express his beliefs doesn’t end at the church door; it is a fundamental right that carries to wherever he happens to stand. It was the search for such freedom of expression that caused the Pilgrims to leave England.

Yet whatever Cathy’s religious beliefs about how marriage should be, those views may be on the losing side in the public square where a large cultural and legal shift is taking place. It has become more and more difficult to defend the idea that certain combinations of legal contracts should be of more benefit to one group than to another group simply based on the gender combination of the people making the contract. In that sense, Western culture is moving to a more liberal view and civil unions of same-sex couples has gained more acceptance in recent decades. It’s difficult to imagine that such a trend will not continue.

And yet, none of this really has anything to do with Chick-fil-A as a company. The firm doesn’t care about its customers’ sexual orientation. The only criteria that a customer is required to have at Chick-fil-A is the ability to eat chicken. I’m not sure what owner Dan Cathy’s personal religious view on marriage has to do with that.

As far as I can tell, gay chickens are not discussed in the Bible.

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of the Barrow Journal. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.