Last month, we reported that Rick Green, David Barton’s right-hand man at WallBuilders, had launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $45,000 to fund a reality television program featuring his family “traveling the nation’s historical sites and teaching about American exceptionalism and our Constitution.”
The effort had not been particularly successful as, with just nine days to go, Green had only raised a little over half of the money he needed:
As luck would have it, the Religious Right is currently up-in-arms that Kickstarter had allegedly “censored” a campaign by conservative filmmakers to raise money to produce a movie about Kermit Gosnell, which was all the excuse that Green needed to justify re-launching his effort using a more “family friendly” service called FaithLauncher and starting over, as he announced in an email he sent out today:
Two weeks later, we are more than halfway to our funding goal with plenty of time to reach it. But last night I learned something that made me immediately regret my decision to do business with them and has caused me to kick Kickstarter to the curb.
As you may have seen in the news, successful documentarians Phelim & Ann McAleer (Fracnation, Mine Your Own Business, Not Evil Just Wrong) had their new project rejected by Kickstarter. The Gosnell Movie tells the horrific story of mass murder in Gosnell’s abortion clinic and exposes the media for ignoring the worst mass murderer in U.S. history. But the Kickstarter execs were concerned about offending their community by talking about abortion, despite the fact they have multiple projects about rape, stabbing, and more.
Kickstarter executives most certainly have the right to accept or reject any project they choose. That is the free market at work and I’d fight and die for their right to do so freely.
However, it cuts both ways.
We also have the free market right to choose vendors that support our values. Or at the very least, that do not reject our values. This is not a perfect science and not always possible. Conservatives are often forced to use market-dominated products like Apple or Google, despite the fact their corporate management supports left-wing causes.
But there is no monopoly on crowd funding sites. There are more than twenty options and I even found one that specifically supports faith-based projects, FaithLauncher.
Interestingly, Green’s Kickstater page is still operational as of the writing of this post, so we are not quite sure what Green means when he says that he decided “to kick Kickstarter to the curb” other than that it provided him with a convenient excuse to re-launch his fundraising effort which appeared destined to fail to reach its stated goal.
