Another week, another big-city mayor inappropriately popping off.

This time it's Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino going on his rant about not allowing a Chick-fil-A restaurant on his city's Freedom Trail.

Menino's remarks came on the heels of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's call for cops to go on strike until the type of gun control laws he preferred to see passed are, in fact, the law of the land.

What is it about mayors in the northeastern part of the country? Is the air different? Has there been too much heat in that neck of the woods this summer? Do these two guys just need to go on vacation to cooler climes and chill for a spell?

What has Menino in such high dudgeon about Chick-fil-A? It turns out the president of the restaurant chain, Dan Cathy, is a devout Christian. On Sundays, not one Chick-fil-A store in the country is open nationwide.

I learned this some time ago and knew that either Chick-fil-A or Cathy would take some heat for it in the future. The United States of America has gone from a nation that was once devoutly Christian to one that is not devoutly Christian-friendly.

So when Cathy made his views about same-sex marriage known recently, I wasn't surprised. Cathy told the Baptist Press that Chick-fil-A was "guilty as charged" with its views on traditional marriage and the traditional family.

"We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles."

Menino clearly is having none of it. Where does this Cathy guy think he lives? America? Menino told a reporter for the Boston Herald exactly what he thinks of Chick-fil-A: "Chick-fil-A doesn't belong in Boston. You can't have a business in the city of Boston that discriminates against the population. We're an open city, we're a city that's at the forefront of inclusion. That's the Freedom Trail. That's where it all started right here. And we're not going to have a company, Chick-fil-A or whatever the hell the name is, on our Freedom Trail."

As a columnist, I love it when an elected official says so many things wrong that it's hard to know where to begin in the criticism. And Menino managed to cram all his into one quote.

First: "You can't have a business in the city of Boston that discriminates against the population." Really? Just whom did Cathy's remarks discriminate against? Chick-fil-A executives released a statement about discrimination, and it went like this: "The Chick-fil-A culture and service tradition in our restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect -- regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender."

It sounds like Menino wants to bust Chick-fil-A's hump for this reason, and this reason only: The company won't tow his line -- and the line of the gay rights movement -- on the matter of same-sex marriage, which brings me to the second point: Doesn't Menino's arm-twisting, bullying, darn-near jackboot treatment of Chick-fil-A run counter to the very notion of freedom as we know it?

"If they need licenses in the city," Menino said of Chick-fil-A executives, "it will be very difficult -- unless they open up their policies." In other words, all Chick-fil-A execs have to do is hop on board the gay marriage train and everything will be hunky dory for them, at least in Boston. Sorry, Mayor Menino, that sounds way too much like Communist Party apparatchiks whipping dissidents into line in Stalinist Russia.

It sure doesn't sound like something that we should hear within earshot of the Freedom Trail.

Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.