Since it was a family dinner I got the job of peeling the potatoes. Seems it must have been a bushel and I knew there would be creamed mashed spuds to accompany grandma's outstanding dinner of perfect gravy, corn on the cob, cranberries and some other things like fantastic hot rolls dripping with real butter which I remember to this day. Homemade apple pie and ice cream followed.

There was a happy crowd that night but I couldn't partake of the fowl. I left the chicken legs, wings, breasts and gizzards and other for my older and wiser relations while I considered some different dietary items.

Thanks to the colonel from Kentucky and other evil fast food denizens I learned to occasionally have a southern fried chicken sandwich. It also helped that my sockless doctor advised that eating baked chicken without the bread would also be of help to a No. 2 diabetes condition.

It's a difficult thing and nutty in these days of the brazen minority hell-raisers to be broad-minded in a public sort of way. It can be rather scary and intimidating if you dare to be normal in a traditional sort of way.

Had the president of Chick-fil-A said his restaurants wouldn't sell food to Baptists, Anabaptists or the Amish reaction would be less than a paragraph in print media and not a second on commercial airways. He didn't say that of course. He wasn't refusing food to anyone without regard to race, creed, color, religion or national origin.

Instead news consumers were treated to complete coverage of scraggly homosexual men and untidy women lip-locking joyously, not on spicy chicken wings, legs and breasts, but on each other.

Every network, every local television station and all newspaper front pages had the smooching pictures large and small. Of course it was news rather than prurient interests. No newspapers were delivered in brown wrappers. That could have been a nice marketing ploy though.

It is dangerous these days to express any outrage over such shenanigans. Those who practice Christian beliefs and catechisms have to be careful or else be termed scary, out of touch, buffoon sand fanatics and face vicious ridicule and possible criminal charges.

In defense of the media, they have lots of time to fill (between commercials) and lots of space in the news pages of papers. Thus I wasn't surprised either at the all-day breastfeeding spectacle on the national mall. I don't think it was sweeps week but it was something, especially as the television reporter tried to keep a straight face in his standup.

I don't care one whit who loves who or when and where mothers want to feed their little imps.

During the live reports and photos of the peculiar kissers and attention-seekers on the Mall, it was far more "nourishing, palatable and salubrious", to borrow a great phrase, to see and hear Marilyn Monroe's magnificent birthday salute to President JFK. I saw it on my black-and-white television in May 1962 and refreshed myself again on YouTube. It was better this time.

To celebrate my ongoing broadmindedness and progressiveness, it's off to Dan Cathy's Chick-fil-A premises everywhere I get a chance.

Harry Covert writes from Alexandria, Va., and Frederick, Md. He contributes to numerous weekly newspapers, magazines and has edited national and weekly newspapers. He serves as editor at large for The Covert Letter