Josh Barro, Columnist

The Problem With Chick-fil-A Offsets

August 6, 2012 at 10:18 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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My friend Ted Frank has a new project: selling "Chicken Offsets" to people who enjoy Chick-fil-A but don't want to indirectly support anti-gay causes. Most of the purchase price of these offsets will be donated to pro-gay organizations such as the It Gets Better Project. As Frank notes:

Chick-fil-A sells $4,100,000,000 of chicken a year and donates about 0.04% of that to Christian organizations that are only anti-gay in a collateral sense. Buying a chicken offset does far more for gay rights than boycotting the chain because someone asked a business executive so religiously Christian that he insists that the stores be closed on Sunday what he thought about gay marriage and people are pretending to be surprised by the answer.