Playing Chicken

Who would have thought that we'd be lining up to either buy a chicken sandwich at Chick-Fil-A or swearing that we'll never give them another nickel?  Perhaps we owe this current perfect storm of political discourse to the social network age we live in.  When everyone's thoughts and opinions are traveling at the "speed of twitter" is there much time for reflection and consideration?  My own Facebook page has been host to several heated discussions on this topic and as always I'm looking to, if not make sense of the situation, at least make note of the good questions to be asking.  Answers tend to be stated and then written in stone, questions live longer and perhaps offer more possibilities.  Here's my current thoughts (under construction, in progress, not written in stone, etc.) Trying to explain dispensational theology, to show why Biblical quotes about marriage in the Old Testament are not applicable for us today, is probably not really useful because it assumes one particular idea about the Bible as an inerrant reference is accurate and all others are not.  I mention this because I just read several posts on FB where one friend tried to explain to another how they chose which verses would be considered valid.  Trying to debate who is really a "bigot", the one who opposes equal rights or the one who opposes opposing equal rights, probably won't get us too far either.  So I notice that words like "bigot" have a definition in the dictionary but they also carry huge amounts of baggage and when you employ them you probably should pay attention to the baggage that's being dragged around like a moldy old suitcase behind the words.  I also think that while we all have freedom of speech, it's very naive to believe that you have a freedom from any reaction to your speech.  If there is something that can be written in stone I'd say it's that when you speak people will have an opinion, people will react.  After all, why speak your mind if you don't expect people to react?  Words are powerful, words are dangerous, words should be treated with respect.  Since I just suggested that questions are often better than answers I'll pose a few; Can a news story like this be a reference point for talking with students about the power of words? Can a story like this offer a chance to look at how people debate ideas in the public sphere? Is it possible to step back and look at a situation from outside of your own opinions?