Prop 8 Backers Whining about Boycotts

According to an article in USA Today, “Prop 8 opponents turn to boycotts” (Dec. 22, 2008, p. 5A), some of those who contributed heavily to backing California’s ballot measure against gay marriage are complaining that they are being blacklisted. First off, they are are being boycotted and one should never confuse the two. A blacklist is when an institution of authority (the government or the studios) make it impossible for a group to do business, regardless of market demand for their services. It’s what the studios did in the McCarthy era and what the Nazis did to the Jews before the decided that exterminating them would be a better solution. As my dear Professor Richard Sugarman, who knows a thing or two about the Holocaust used to say, the Nazis said “You can’t work here” followed by “You can’t live here” followed by “You can’t live.” The blacklist was the first step in that tragic progression.

A boycott is, on the other hand, what civil rights leaders in the US, anti-apartheid activists, environmental activists (e.g. with respect to Home Depot) and various Christian activist groups have done. It simply operates on the principle that in a free market, all consumers have choices about how to spend their money. Given that freedom, they can choose not to support business who donate to causes those consumers do not support. Thus a business that, for example, produces toys but also gives heavily to Planned Parenthood, may find conservative Christian groups organizing a boycott. A business that gives heavily to anti-abortion activists ay find itself boycotted by pro-choice activists as Domino’s Pizza did. I can’t for the life of me (which perhaps i shouldn’t say in that context) see anything wrong with this. In fact, I would say that it is far, far better than bombing abortion clinics or spiking trees.

But Robert Hoehn, who donated $25,000 to the Prop 8 campaign and is seeing his car dealerships being boycotted by Prop 8 opponents, says “I just hate being pigeonhoeld as a hate monger or bigot.” Well Bob, let me be the 5,481st genius to tell you that’s sort of the point of a most boycotts. That is to say that the point is to hurt you economically because of your choices which, typically, the boycotters see as immoral, unethical, bigotted, anti-evironmental or whatever axe they’re grinding.

Personally, I would be happy to have some group organize a massive boycott of Taken For Ranted because I have called Sean Hannity a dangerous and vicious man hell-bent on undermining fundamental protections of the US Consistution. Not that boycotting TFR would exactly hurt my income since I suppose I can afford to give up the $2/month I make off t-shirts (almost none of which are sold via this site anyway). But to be honest, I suspect that Sean Hannity, if he knew I existed, would be pleased to know that a whacko lefty nut job like me considers him dangerous and I would certainly be flattered if he would return the favor. Please Sean, boycott me. There’s no way I could ever afford to buy the kind of publicity that would bring me.

One of the great corrupters in a democratic society is the large flow of anonymous money into the political process. Of course, in theory, that flow of money is documented and not anonymous, but in practice we rarely know who is giving where. Making that knowledge available makes us responsible. If we knew that all our neighbors would know what causes we did and didn’t donate to, would that change our behavior. More importantly, if a week before an election, we got a list of the biggest donors and the biggest donors in our district and the total amount given to a candidate or ballot measure, would that not make the process more honest?

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A friend’s wife joined a good Christian church where they believe in beating the children in order to save their souls. Seems like a reasonable enough trade. But then, we’re talking beating with sticks and belts. We’re talking bruises, welts and blood. I suppose it will make the little tykes righteous.

The friend was unable to get custody of the children and take them out of that house because the courts said it was a freedom of religion issue. Like stoning adulterers? Why won’t the corrupt secular courts let good Christians practice their biblically guaranteed right to stone adulterers to death? I am suggesting that they assert this as a freedom of religion issue. It’s too late to get to Jim Bakker and Strom Thurmond, but they could still get Bill Clinton and they seem to have a thousand reasons to want to do that.

Apart from adultery, there is an enormous problem with pornography in the Christian community. According to one survey , “37% of pastors said porn was a struggle for them.” Over half said it was a temptation. Other surveys indicate that over 50% of men attending a Promise Keepers stadium event had viewed porn in the previous week. One Christian, sure that it couldn’t be that 50% of the men in his parish were into porn, suggested a survey. He was right: in his parish it was 61% and he suspects underreporting. It’s a serious issue.

It’s so serious, in fact, that as part of my modest plea for biblical literalism, I would suggest that the biblical literalists among that 61%, please go pluck your eyes out (Mathew18:9). And if you don’t feel like plucking your eye out just right now, please consider being more tolerant of those who don’t fit in with those few areas of Old Testament morality that you choose to enforce (fear of gays seems to be tops on the list these days) and, dare I say it, just a little less tolerant of some of those areas where we all come up short of a New Testament morality (like helping the poor and turning the other cheek)?

By the way, yes this is a sarcastic article, but the Crosswalk article I link to is really interesting (that’s the one about the 61%). I’m certainly not meaning to attack people like that author.

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Greenleaf, ID, asks all heads of households to own firearms

Yup, as the proposed ordinance says:

“In order to provide for the emergency management of the city, and further in order to provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants,” the proposal says, “it is recommended that every head of household residing in the city limits maintain a firearm, together with ammunition”

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It’s always fun to go into the city in the Central Valley and get exposed the the Limbaugh-listening, Coulter-reading world out there. At the library, I saw a license plate frame that said “Truth not Tolerance”. To put it mildly, I’m guessing that the owner of that particular car doesn’t agree with me on many points and to me it had the ring of the religious right. Sure enough, a quick little internet search (and here) turned up several sites devoted to the Truth not Tolerance “movement” (if I can call it such). Their core belief could be summed up in a nutshell as the belief that “we” should not “go around showing respect for other people’s false religions and concepts of the Truth.” I don’t happen to believe that myself of course, but I do strongly agree with their slogan, Truth not Tolerance, which in isolation is essentially value neutral. Or more precisely, it says is that tolerance is not on the top rung in the hierarchy of values. That, as it turns out is one of the least controversial things one could say and every thinking person, right, left and center agrees (or should agree) that there are truths and values that outstrip tolerance.
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Another news item that’s a followup on a previous post on the Intelligent Design Smokescreen:

“But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science,” he wrote, calling intelligent design unscientific. “It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious.”

— Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, in the Jan. 16-17 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, official newspaper of the Vatican as quoted in The New York Times

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Intelligent Design is a smokescreen that purports to be based on rigorous science, but is simply an attempt to squeeze neo-creationism in the back door. In fact, NPR reported that according to evidence presented as part of the case that was settled today in Pennsylvania prohibiting the teaching of Intelligent Design in school, the original manuscript of one of the touchstone ID texts, Pandas and People, had 150 references to “creationism” that were merely replaced with “Intelligent Design”.

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NEWSFLASH: The Ranter has declared war on Christmas! Or at least Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson and the other genius right-wingers at Faux News believe that liberal, left, secularists like The Ranter have declared war on Christmas. I hate to disappoint, so I have created a “Make war on Christmas, not Iraq” bumper sticker. Joining me in this anti-crusade is John Calvin, the famous Reformer of Geneva, father of the Puritan movement and one of the original soldiers in the war on Christmas.
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Kansas, most frequently in the news because they insist on teaching religion during science classes, has decided to move on to a new front in the culture wars. A principal in Kansas recently suspended a student for speaking Spanish.

Defend Free Speech: become a card-carrying member!

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