Not by sending out letters to denounce Home Depot’s founder, Bernie Marcus for advocating violence by stating that retailers who don’t support the GOP should be shot. Nope. I’m sure that was your first guess, as it should have been, but it is not even close.
If your personal reason for boycotting Home Depot has been that they donate ungodly (pun intended) amounts of money to Republican politicians who want to destroy the middle class, and maybe, by miracle or a blow to the head or some stroke of good luck, Home Depot has finally realized people without homes or incomes don’t make good customers and this offends the AFA, you would be wrong, too. Talk about shooting - don’t they realize that while they advocate shooting other retailers they are shooting themselves in the foot with GOP donations?
Home Depot offended the hateful AFA members by “signing on†as a festival vendor in the 2012 Philadelphia Pride Festival. As usual, it isn’t enough for the hateful group to simply make the announcement without bold-lettering their sensationalized rhetoric. Hatred and lies are Christian values that they must uphold in every mass mailing, right? Otherwise, they’d have to stop calling themselves a Christian group and claiming tax exempt status. Holy $! Can’t have that.
This time, they prey on the hatred of their millions of clueless members with this:
Home Depot signed on as a "festival" vendor, conducting Kid's Craft Workshops for children in the midst of lewd activities, including nudity and homosexual activities.
Home Depot doesn't see a problem associating itself with the celebration of depravity. But to operate a booth for the purpose of attracting children is unconscionable. The photos at right show the children's booth, although adults obscured our camera's view of the children.
(Note: If their cameraman didn’t plant the adult obstructionists or wait until someone finally stepped in the way to take his shot, I ask their god to strike me dead before I finish typing. This should keep you on the edge of your seat waiting for the end.)
AFA partners with Americans For Truth on this message. (Ever wonder why these groups choose names that in no way describe who they really are?) Their message,
“Home Depot knows that transvestites, cross-dressers, and the promotion of gay sex are mainstays at these events. This is where Home Depot set up a children's booth!â€
tells me they don’t care about families; they care about spreading their homophobic beliefs by denying the children of pride parade supporters a booth at the parade. Nice people, huh? Wonder if they also wanted to snatch hotdogs, Popsicles, and sand-art bottles from those children? Deny them port-a-pot access? Wish them skinned knees?
The problem with this one is that I’m torn. Usually, when the AFA asks me to contact businesses and express their hateful views, I contact those people and thank them for ignoring this bunch of hateful, homophobic, hypocrites. It’s going to be hard for me to contact Home Depot and thank them for supporting the parade. Maybe it will feel better if I do that and add that I might consider shopping there when they stop donating make contributions to GOP candidates.
AFA's request:
TAKE ACTION
1. If you have not done so, sign the Boycott Pledge at XXXXXX (removed because I refuse to promote their hatred)
2. Call your local store manager. Let the manager know that you will not be shopping at The Home Depot until the company stops supporting the homosexual agenda. You can find the phone number here. (click "Store Finder").
3. Print the paper petition and distribute it at Sunday School and church
(Nothing quite like teaching hatred in Sunday School, huh)
*still alive. I think this means their god of hate does not exist.
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Comments: 59
Sorry 'bout the rant, but that level of hypocrisy just infuriates me.
We also have a Wal Mart within walking distance, but my wife absolutely forbids me to shop there. It's okay with me. I don't like the store anyway.
What's good for the shareholders and CEO's is not necessarily what's good for the country. That's why corporations need to be regulated...and why they hate to be regulated
No matter what the regulations might be, the corporations find them onerous. They simply cannot stand the idea that they should not be able to make as much money as they can by any means they can, to the moral, physical, spiritual and ultimately financial detriment of everyone else. A corporation is like the fabled black box: push a button, $100 goes into your bank account, and someone in China or Uruguay or Rwanda dies. If you don't see that death, if you don't know that person, does it really happen? I believe that responsible capitalism can actually be practiced and a profit made which is not generated by causing others pain and damage. But for one company to abide by The Rules while others don't and reap higher profits thereby is unacceptable. So we can either make all the corporations abide by The Rules, or chuck The Rules and yell "Go get 'em boys!". Because if you soften The Rules every time a CEO says "Ouch", pretty soon he's going to be saying "Ouch" just to see what happens.
And I have very little sympathy for share holders. People get to choose where they invest (even if you have mutual funds) so I give them no wiggle room when it comes to investing in companies who do not care how they affect others. I find greed disgusting, at any level.
One thing about AFA, it's hard to avoid offending them.
Even harder for them to avoid offending me. In fact, I don't think that is possible.
Yay! Looking forward to the reality show, "When Republicans Attack...Republicans."
I am not a Christian, but have grown up in a Christian milieu. I have read the Bible, attended services of many denominations. The one thing I got out of it all is that Christ's most important message, the sum of all his teaching, is "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your spirit, and your neighbor as yourself". He did not add "unless he's queer", "unless he's black", "unless he's a Democrat". His statement is absolute and unconditional, and does not, unlike many other elements of the Bible, admit of any change or interpretation.
Yes, Jesus' two great commandments are the foundation, and yes, the parable of the Good Samaritan is directly linked to the second commandment as the answer to the question, "who is my neighbor?" It is instructive that the Levite in the parable (probably an assistant priest) crossed the road. He was observing the purity laws that would have forbidden his touching either a sick person with perhaps open wounds or the member of an "untouchable" class. In other words, he was following the dictates of his religion. Jesus ripped out all that "wiring" and centered His concerns on the inspired human heart. His message is loud and clear.
It is interesting to me that of the Ten Commandments (which of course does not mention homosexuality), violation of the first half are sins only against God; violation of the second half hurt others. If reckoned a sin, homosexuality is of the first kind, and it seems that in most religions, the emphasis is on the heinousness of the first kind, not of transgression again one's fellow man.
Incidentally, there was a lot of strange shit going on in Rome between circa 38 and 64 CE, Paul's letter-writing years. Let's see—Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. I wonder if Paul had some things to rant about to the Romans and others.
Since I cannot think of a single cogent secular argument against any aspect of homosexuality (except their agenda to place Barbra Streisand on the $1 bill while she's still alive), that pretty much puts it back into the lap of religion. And as I am not religious, I can see NO valid reason for any form of discrimination against gays (again, except for the Streisand issue).
And in re the "plumbing argument", aniko:
There was a young gay from Khartoum
Who took a lesbian up to his room
And they argued all night
Over who had the right
To do what and with which and to whom.
If you pay close attention, I'll bet these are the same people who don't understand analogy, who see things in only black and white, who haven't expressed an original thought - ever, who will repeat exactly what a friend said, who can't apply what they learn about one topic to another topic, and who never see the bigger picture.
There is no doubt that many religious cultural elements survive faith in largely no-longer-religious societies*. There were in fact many such references around in the Hungary of my childhood -there was all the architecture and music and art and literature, full of the stuff. And attitudes can survive without even that substrate, just by people doing what they've "always" been doing. But I don't believe that retention of religious ideas was a significant component when it comes to homophobia. Obviously, the fact that my first encounters with homophobia involved no religious content makes this absence salient and perhaps overvalued for me, but I believe the world-wide pattern supports the same view that religions in this case are just screens onto which to project the fear and disgust, and that secular ideas of what's "natural" work in the same way. This would explain the discrepancy between how little you can find about this in religious texts and how important some religious people appear to consider the "problem".
I have heard that limerick before. :)
*That's how I would describe the environment I grew up in, rather than just nominal/official atheism. I understand there was a bit more religion left in rural areas than in the city, but my observations of homophobia are from the city, too.
My father spent most of his working life in Hollywood, as have I, and despite the fact that he was a Southern California Republican was remarkably non-homophobic, having worked with and for many gays (long before they were "gay"; the hijacking of this word is the only thing I have against them as a class). I worked at record store in Georgetown during the second half of the '70s, the Golden Age of Disco; because of the abundance of civil service jobs in DC, there was a very large gay population there, among a large number of out customers (and one of our clerks). Dealing with gays on a daily basis for many years, and having several gay friends and acquaintances may have helped me see them as people, or maybe old age has mellowed me, but the raving, drooling homophobia evinced by many down to the snide, "well, they're OK up to a point" attitude of others I find just as annoying as racism, ageism and NY Yankee fanism.
Pete, I said "virtually in every culture" because I'm aware of those "exceptions". But as you acknowledge, some of them were specific practices that existed in particular social niches, and in a way became their markers or shibboleths. Not only are we left guessing what the everyman of those cultures thought about them, but often these customs were exploitative and had nothing to do with what we understand to be a committed, loving same-sex relationship today. This is especially true of the oft-referenced Greco-Roman tradition. In fact, homosexual relationships that did not involve young boys or slaves as the passive partner were strongly condemned by a number of Greek and Roman commentators. The Native American berdache tradition comes closer to what we understand as same-sex love today, but even that covered only transgenderal unions (with one partner playing the socially acceptable role of the other gender), and not companionate ones (two men or two women being "themselves"). There are reports of similar practices occurring and being okay elsewhere - and that includes medieval Christian Europe.
The truth is that don't really have even the vaguest sense of how these things played out in these societies. What we do know is what is happening today, and "Buddhist countries" are not the leaders in women's rights or LGBT rights. The world leaders are all "Christian countries" (retaining here your "cultural" definition). Obviously, I'm not arguing that Christianity "did that". "Development" stands out as the unmistakable and giant confounding factor. But that is, in fact, my point: it isn't religion.
(You're familiar with Asian cultures, so I don't have to tell you how patriarchal they manage to be in their traditional forms without the help of Abrahamic religions. You might have also heard the Dalai Lama's take on "sexual misconduct" [anything but heterosexual vaginal intercourse], but I find that many haven't, so there's a link.)
And we might also discuss homosexuality in baseball...
If we'd all pull away from the big stores and support locally owned ones, most would probably carry what we want and the prices would come down because they wouldn't be struggling to keep the doors open.