infinite improbability

Stupid boycotts: Part two

I waited a couple of days to blog this because I was too mad the day it happened and the coherence of any rants would probably have been pretty low.

As I already said, some random guy decided to boycott all Federated Department stores (parent company of Macy's) to try to force them to put "Merry Christmas" in all of their advertising. See the post where I outlined why it's a very bad idea.

The guy behind the boycott is just some random guy out in California with no direct connection with any major conservative group who has a poorly designed website (but "it gets 20,000 hits a day" so that proves it's legit, so says the guy behind it) but who managed to get some guy, Robert Knight, at Concerned Women For America to take him seriously, and since Mr. Knight has plenty of connections with legitimate organizations, it's making it's rounds around conservative circles. Focus on the Family ran an opinion piece masquerading as a news story written by Knight as an online extra to Citizen Magazine, and between Manuel Zamorano the Committe to Save Merry Christmas guy and Robert Knight, it's managed to get mentioned on Fox News and Sean Hannity's radio show.

I sent an e-mail to Knight at CWFA that was similar to my blog post, but a lot more polished, and recieved a response that completely missed the point. However, he forwarded my e-mail to Mr. Zamorano, who then decided on Wednesday to call me up on the phone. I was out shopping when he called so he gave a big spiel to my mom, who kept telling him to just call me on my cell phone, so as I'm driving home from the beach listening to sports radio, my phone rings and it's that guy on the other end. If you want the short version, it suffices to say that my conversation with him convinced me that he's a bit of a kook who shouldn't be taken seriously by the people who are taking him seriously, and that Federated was right in ignoring him--he falls into the category of people who threaten to sue the company over naked mannequins.

The long story is that he told me about how the company ignored the e-mails he sent to the CEO and to the board of directors (what kind of guy expects to be taken seriously if he's not even sending paper letters to heads of corporations?), and that they aren't negotiating in good faith because they wouldn't talk to him (seems to me that the burden of proof for why he deserves a hearing is on him, not the company for ignoring him). I tried to explain that the language he used in communicating with Federated is the sort of language that evangelicals will understand but that corporate types aren't going to get it, but he kept repeating about how it was so obvious and they should just do what he wants and put "Merry Christmas" in the windows of stores and in the advertising. I told him that what the company is hearing is that he's demanding that they ignore and alienate their Jewish and Muslim customers. His response: "well, they're going to have to make a choice." At that point, I tried to respond but he cut me off with a condecending "hear me out, hear me out" (nevermind that he kept interrupting everything I tried to say), and it wasn't until several minutes later that I was able to bring the conversation back to that point. When I brought the conversation back to that and said that the company shouldn't be forced to make a choice between their Christian customers and their Jewish and Muslim customers and that they should be able to reach all of those groups, he then insisted that the company should know that he's not trying to make them exclude those people because he "didn't even mention Jews or Muslims in the letter." That's precisely the point. By his failure to mention people of other faiths and his failure to make it clear that he wasn't advocating exclusionary practices, the message that the company got was that he was doing precisely that.

What really gets to me, and which convinced me that Federated was right in ignoring him, was when he told me "I don't care if the employees say 'Merry Christmas' they can say whatever they want, and I don't care if the stores play Christmas music." Talk about symbolism over substance! Then he has the gall to act apologetic that his stupid little boycott is going to hurt my paycheck since I work on commission, and I told him that he obviously didn't care about the little guy because if he did, he wouldn't be doing the boycott.

The thing that embarrasses me the most about all of this is that conservative organizations have so little sense that they're going along with this guy. People like that make me embarrassed to call myself a conservative. If being a conservative means having absolutely no capacity for discourse or intellectual thought, and means that you have to make up your mind without knowing the facts and then refuse to be pursuaded otherwise when the facts are presented to you, then thank you very much but I'd prefer not to be associated with the term. It's people like them who give the rest of us a bad name.