#Hands off Chick-fil-A and other commentary

From the Left: Hands Off Chick-fil-A

Assembly Democrats “are wrong to suggest that Chick-fil-A be essentially canceled, at least from public property in New York, for its political views and contributions,” explain the editors of Albany’s Times-Union, and not just because the company “mostly stopped giving to groups opposed to rights based on sexual orientation nearly a decade ago.” More important, “Chick-fil-A has a First Amendment right to express its views and donate to organizations without government punishment. And choosing or excluding state vendors based on political views and contributions sets a dangerous precedent. What if future governors decide to forbid restaurants that give to their political opponents?” And “those who oppose Chick-fil-A have a choice: They can eat somewhere else.”

Conservative: Slandering Natural Law

Natural law is the theory that “all human beings, regardless of their race or any other characteristic, have inherent rights, which can be discovered and applied through reason,” writes The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson — so it’s downright depressing that Yale University philosopher ­Jason Stanley recently characterized it as “a dog whistle to white, Christian nationalism.” In fact, natural law, developed by Aristotle and later Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, “is an antidote to racism and its various ideological offspring like white nationalism, not a cause of it. As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once said, ‘those who deny natural law cannot get me out of slavery.’ ”

Tax take: Private-Equity Firms Pay Their Share

Last month, ProPublica charged that some execs never sell their investment shares and so don’t pay taxes on them — yet that isn’t typical in the private-equity industry, the American Investment Council’s Steve Klinsky notes at RealClearPolitics. For private-equity firms, the model is: “buy, build, sell and pay tax.” These firms purchase or start companies, improve them and then resell them “within a 10-year period,” generating federal tax revenue. “PE transactions make the federal cash register ring,” and these days, it’s ringing “a lot”: Taxable income “could be about $250 billion in the past six months alone.” And the companies they hold employ 11.7 million people. So they aren’t “a form of tax avoidance,” but of “business-value creation” and “tax-revenue creation” of “the highest order.”

Foreign desk: Xi’s Threat

“If anybody had lingering doubts about the ruthlessness of the Chinese Communist Party, the speech President Xi Jinping delivered” two weeks ago “to mark the centenary of the party’s founding should have removed them,” declares Nigel Farage at Newsweek. “At no point did he mention the misery and mass murder that Mao’s Cultural Revolution inflicted. Instead, by way of tribute to his Communist dictator hero,” he wore Mao-style clothes. Xi said “that anyone who dares to challenge China ‘will have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of Steel,’ an aggressive threat one would associate with a criminal gang.” He is “hell-bent on pursuing total economic and military supremacy over the West, whatever the cost.” Yet even as he further suppresses human rights on the mainland and in Hong Kong, “the West says little and does nothing.”

From the right: A Progressive Lie on Crime

To “avoid responsibility” for the crime wave hitting US cities, leftists have “taken to describing the problem as an issue of gun violence,” notes Aron Ravin at National Review. Even though “the data show that police killings are both infrequent and unrelated to racial bias,” Democrats’ radical anti-policing ideas “moved from the fringes toward the heart of progressive politics, crowding out common sense.” But with public opposition to those policies mounting, Democrats now “tout gun control, one of their main policy goals, as a solution to the crime surge their own policies helped create.” In reality, “federal gun-control measures would do nothing to resolve the current problem.” Many Americans already “see the progressive narrative about guns and crime for the charade that it is,” but let’s hope more ­“become clear-eyed soon.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board