Yesterday during In The Market, Dan Gainor of the right-wing Media Research Center and host Janet Parshall are the latest conservative activists to deny their movement’s history of supporting boycotts in order to attack gay rights groups protesting Chick-fil-A, agreeing that “conservatives generally are against boycotts” while freedom-hating liberals just can’t help themselves:
Gainor: This is a line in the sand for everybody listening, for every American right now: what country do we want to have, do we want to have people just say ‘well I don’t like what you believe so we’re going to destroy your business’?
Parshall: Exactly. Dan let me pick up on that point because I think it’s a great one. Paradoxically, in the midst of this brouhaha with Chick-fil-A comes the announcement that Amazon.com CEO and his wife give $2.5 million to Washington state for the same-sex marriage battle going on there. I tell you what, I get an awful lot of press releases all day long and I’m still waiting, I have yet to hear a Christian group that’s saying we’re going to boycott Amazon.com because their founder and CEO has decided to make a multimillion dollar contribution to battle against something that I happen to hold dear and believe in. So this tactic, unfortunately, seems to be one sided, one the one hand I guess I can understand it, and on the other hand, it’s just not the way Christians behave in the marketplace.
Gainor: Conservatives generally are against boycotts. We’ll boycott occasionally for something that’s really extreme. But we accept that people have different values and different opinions, that’s called democracy, we tend to like that and like our Constitution and like our freedom of speech.
Parshall: I couldn’t agree more.
Huh, that’s odd since the National Organization for Marriage is boycotting Starbucks and General Mills, and the American Family Association and the Catholic League are boycotting countless companies. In fact, the AFA’s One Million Moms has said “so long Amazon.”
Concerned Women for America, Parshall’s former employer which recently urged shoppers to stop shopping at Macy’s and once endorsed a boycott of Disney, just today sent an email to members warning them about shopping at…Amazon.com! While they claimed that the group “does not participate in boycotts,” they suggested members shop at their website instead of Amazon.com due to their CEO’s pro-gay rights contribution:
Now Amazon.com Founder and President Jeff Bezos is wading into the moral morass by offering 2.5 million investor dollars (unlike Amazon.com, Chick-fil-A is privately owned) to same-sex “marriage” advocates in Washington state in retaliation for the Cathy’s religious stance. (We’re also taking it personally, as Maureen Richardson, State Director for CWA of Washington, has fought like a lioness against the efforts of liberal legislators to redefine marriage.)
Concerned Women for America (CWA) is supporting the Chick-fil-A Day of Appreciation on August 1, 2012, in defense of a Christian family that is being absolutely excoriated by the mainstream media, public officials, private companies, and irate liberals for honoring their faith.
While CWA does not participate in boycotts, we understand that the brazen, politically correct move of Amazon.com’s founder and president may trouble some of our members and supporters. If you feel uneasy shopping at Amazon.com, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our own store, www.shopcwfa.org, carries over 170,000 Christian titles, and part of every purchase goes back to CWA so we can continue to be your voice on Capitol Hill and in the culture.
Gainor’s MRC promoted boycotts against McDonalds and Ford that were organized by anti-gay groups, denouncing journalists for not giving them enough attention, and MRC head Brent Bozell lauded the Southern Baptists Convention’s boycott against Disney as the “correct” decision:
The Mouse answered with a spit in the face. The Disney-owned production company Touchstone, along with Disney-owned ABC television, brought America the most hyped, high-profile homosexual happening in entertainment history: “Ellen.” To no one’s surprise, on June 18 the 1997 SBC overwhelmingly voted to undertake an all-out boycott of Disney and its subsidiaries.
Bozell also said that boycotts are an important tool for pressure groups and commended groups like CWA for joining the cause:
It certainly grew on August 27 when Dr. James Dobson announced that his organization, Focus on the Family, would join the SBC, the Catholic League, Concerned Women for America (CWA), the American Family Association (AFA), and several smaller groups. The SBC claims 16 million members; Focus on the Family four million; the Catholic League, the AFA, and CWA several hundred thousand each. Add those numbers up and you’ve got an awful lot of parents whose entertainment dollars have bought a lot of Disney products for their children.
…
A Disney executive has said his company thinks of the boycott as analogous to “a gnat on an elephant.” But remember this: gnats are persistent, and if you’ve ever been plagued by a cloud of them, you know you’ll do almost anything to make them leave you alone. If the boycott reaches gnat-cloud proportions – which it probably will given the tenacity of the boycott’s leaders – Michael Eisner, et al, will want to shoo it away, and fast. The good news is that Disney can do so simply by returning to the family-friendly product that won it a special place in American cultural history.
But forget all that, conservatives don’t boycott!
