Well, that is until the mosaic includes a business that's associated with those "distasteful" Christians. Then it's, "There goes the neighborhood".
A recent essay in the very upscale glossy The New Yorker sets a new standard for supercilious bigotry and hypocrisy among elitist progressives. The piece is written by Dan Piepenbring who bemoans the "creepy infiltration" into Manhattan by Chick-fil-a restaurants.
What Piepenbring finds intolerable about Chick-fil-a is that its late founder S. Truett Cathy was explicitly Christian and the Christian ethos filters down through, and permeates, the entire corporation. This insufferable fact makes Piepenbring forget all about diversity and tolerance and multiculturalism and all those other admirable progressive virtues. Piepenbring writes:
[T]here’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety.So why is "suburban piety" a bad thing? Evidently because it consists of a set of values at variance with those of the aristocrats at The New Yorker who, under any other circumstances, would declaim on their love for diversity.
Piepenbring spends time, for instance, criticizing Cathy's opposition to gay marriage, Chick-fil-a's emphasis on community, and, believe it or not, their unconscionable exploitation of cows in their ads, but his and his magazine's ultimate disdain seems directed at the fact that all of this has Christian overtones. Piepenbring and his editors are, when all else has been said, repelled by the notion of a Christian business in Manhattan.
A tweet from the New Yorker makes this pretty clear:
Chick-fil-A’s arrival in New York City feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism.Yikes! "Infiltration". And "creepy" infiltration, no less, according to the title of the article. And "Pervasive Christian traditionalism", too. Is this a reference to the "distasteful" values of the sort found in every community in this country for the last two hundred years? Why is "pervasive Christian traditionalism" so alarming to the snobbish elites at the magazine?
They don't clearly say, and perhaps I'm making too much of their banal article, but on the other hand ask yourself this question:
If a restaurant chain run by Muslims, Jews, African Americans or Hispanics moved into Manhattan would The New Yorker ever dream of headlining an article on this development by calling it a "creepy infiltration"?
I don't think so either. The business would doubtless be hailed as a wonderful addition to the community mosaic and anyone who thought otherwise would be assumed guilty of bigotry.
Perhaps the same could be said, then, of the attitudes expressed in Piepenbring's silly column.