When the mayor of Boston urged Chick-fil-A’s owner to take a hike because of his publicly stated views on traditional marriage, Daniel J. Flynn was not surprised. Flynn explains why in a column for Human Events.
Boston is a city founded on intolerance. Lone inhabitant William Blackstone invited the Puritans to settle on his peninsula only to have his guests eject him because his beliefs weren’t theirs. “I have come from England because I did not like the Lord Bishops,” the first Bostonian lamented. “I cannot join you because I would not be under the lord brethren.”
On the same Boston Common where Blackstone once lived as a hermit, Bostonians executed four Quakers in 1659, 1660, and 1661. It’s a short walk from there to Chik-fil-A.
Dan Cathy isn’t the first Baptist the Bay State has mistreated. “When the Baptists opened a meeting-house in Boston, it was taken possession of by the magistrates,” Daniel Wait Howe wrote in “The Puritan Republic of the Massachusetts Bay in New England.” “The doors were nailed up and a notice was posted, forbidding the holding of meetings there, and it is said that when the members assembled for worship they were arrested and treated very roughly.”
Massachusetts burned more witches than the rest of the colonies combined. It cut off the ears of nonconformist Christians, fined celebrants of Christmas, and forbade wedding rings. The Commonwealth banned Jesuits under the pain of death.
There is a direct ancestral line between this 17th century intolerance and the modern version of it. Then and now, the purveyors of intolerance imagined themselves as the paragons of progressive tolerance.
Massachusetts served as the epicenter of the Know Nothing Party. In 1854, the Know Nothings won every congressional seat, every seat in the state senate, every state constitutional office, and all but 3 of 379 seats in the state house of representatives. They proceeded to prohibit alcohol, strip funding to Catholic schools as they imposed readings from the King James Bible in public ones, ban teaching foreign languages in schools, and even remove a Latin inscription from above the Speaker of the House’s desk. They regarded themselves as tolerant, too.
And that’s not even mentioning how they feel about Yankees fans.
