Yeah, I guess it’s a good thing no one has come out and actually called someone’s actions homophobic. Except, like, when you did.
Also:
[QUOTE=mister nyx]
Actually, Target has a great gay rights record
[/QUOTE]
It was tarnishedjust last year:
That’s, uh, not really comparable.
That was a poster who indicated that she decided to give to the Salvation Army because she learned that they were homophobic and that queer people were upset by it. She deliberately became more supportive of an organization because of their poor treatment of queer people.
What word would you use to describe that if not “homophobia”? I mean, to what level does it have to rise before it qualifies? I would say that being more favorable towards an organization just because you find out that they discriminate against LGBT people is pretty clear-cut. Calling someone like that homophobic is a hell of a long way from calling someone homophobic who has no particular knowledge of the extent of the Salvation Army’s crappy behavior.
I’m actually scared to ask because it’s a little creepy to imagine the sort of mental contortions a person would have to go through to try to rationalize that away as “not homophobic”.
Ugh. If you actually read up some on that, you’ll learn that it’s an absolutely ridiculous case that in no way deserved the response it got; anyone who decided to stop spending at Target over that almost certainly ended up spending their money at much less gay-friendly businesses.
I worked for the Sal for two years. I never saw homophobic issues or RAH RAH JESUS stuff. But I will never donate money to them ever again,
Any of my coworkers that I have worked with, past and who are still working there, will not donate to the Salvation Army either.
They treat their employees like shit.
You’re right, it’s not comparable since it’s the exact same thing. It’s oranges to oranges.
A bunch of words that are reserved for the pit and not decent above ground conversations.
I live in Minnesota. I went through the whole election cycle and the backlash against Target was well deserved. I know many gay Target employees (Target’s HQ is here) and they were quite upset about it.
When I can, I give to a handful of other charities. I hope that soon I will be able to more often, and more generously. (I also wish said charities wouldn’t send such a metric crapload of paper junkmail! Jeez! It makes me think they spent my whole donation just on printing and postage!)
Well, when you recommended against calling someone homophobic just because they donate to the Salvation Army, that’s what I thought you meant, and so I pictured well-meaning people dropping change in a kettle without knowing everything about what they were supporting. Apparently what you actually meant was not to call people homophobic who have specifically said that they are more supportive of the Salvation Army because they learned that the S.A. is a deeply homophobic organization and that queer people are upset by that. Well, then I disagree with you.
I doubt you will be able to make a convincing case for why we should pretend these people are not homophobes but I’ll read your argument if you do.
I don’t know what this means.
And I am still free to maintain that the issue was a tempest in a tea-kettle and that what’s myopic, as it were, is criticizing an organization with a good record on both support for gay political causes and support for queer employees for having donated to a PAC that donated to a candidate with unacceptable views. Especially given that they made up for it by donating just as much directly to a gay cause.
Really? Because that looks like two very different things to me.
The pit is a subsection of The Straight Dope where one may express with more vehemence position that would disparage other posters. Since I believe that my opinion of a poster in this thread who would donate money to the SA because of their position on the GLBT community would fall into that inappropriate place, I opted to remain silent on the issue.
Target tried to have their cake and eat it too. They were enjoying their Supreme Court allotted “personhood” and thought they could get away with donating to a homophobic candidate for Minnesota’s governorship.(An even grosser note, Emmer has said that he would like Michelle Bachmann’s seat should she get the nomination). After being called on it, after numerous boycotts and in store demonstrations, after some lame appeasements, well, not much. Actually, Target was still doing it AFTER they got caught too:
I’m not really showing that they ended up giving as much as you claim to a gay cause. Target (only) donated between $15,000 to $25,999 (in cash or services, the company won’t say) to Twin Cities Gay Pride.
But it’s still myopic to say that that person’s homophobic behavior makes them homophobic?
Unfortunately, despite the fact that this is all public information that is freely available online, the article you linked to opted not to link to it which makes it impossible to evaluate their claims. In particular, they offered a combined sum of donations to PACs and donations to candidates, which leads me to suspect that the actual direct donations to anti-gay candidates were a less impressive sum.
Also, the numbers given are tiny if you’re used to scrutinizing donation records of big corporate PACs. Off the top of my head I could easily name a couple dozen corporations whose PACs have given far more than that to anti-gay organizations in my home state, at least if I’m including PACs that gave to PACs whose money has eventually made its way to anti-gay (i.e. Republican) candidates to statewide office or the state legislature.* Similar things could be said about many, many other companies, which makes me think that the activists who got up in arms about Target are probably largely unaware of what their competition is doing.
Which is not to say that it makes it right but there’s still a big difference between Target and, say, Wal-Mart, if you’re doing your best to support gay-friendly businesses. There may not be many companies out there that are perfect but there’s a big difference between companies who are not perfectly socially responsible with their political activities and companies that treat queer employees badly, or whose political activities are vastly worse. I don’t think it’s legitimate to offer a dichotomy between making only the most perfectly saintly purchases and paying no attention at all to where your money is going.
Honestly, given other, more in depth pieces I’ve read about it in the past (sorry, it’s been awhile since I was looking at this and I don’t remember where they were) and the fact that this article is not all that forthcoming with information, I’m generally inclined to maintain my previous opinion – i.e. that like many big corporations they tend to donate to right-wing causes but that Target also has publicly shown support for queer rights and has a much better record than most of the retail sector of treating queer employees well.
- Just to head off the inevitable sniping from the peanut gallery: I could come up with specific examples to demonstrate the anti-gay bonafides of literally any GOP politician in my state legislature or in high statewide elected office, so please don’t waste my time whining about unfair stereotypes of Republicans.
Is dropping a quarter into the Salvation Army’s bucket de facto homophobic?
No, because that would be stupid.
I’m still missing where Target made good by donating the same amount to a gay organization as they did to the PAC which supported Emmer as you said:
What is stupid is your inability to see the difference between a specific, and individual, condemnation of someone choosing to donate to the Salvation Army specifically to spite LGBT advocates; and a general donation.
If someone boasts of that motivation for giving to the Salvation Army, I don’t see how there’s any way to interpret their behavior as being anything but homophobic. This is not a condemnation of anyone who gives to the Salvation Army, just that one individual - after said individual boasted of their reasons for giving.
I believe that people who donate to the Salvation Army are often ignorant of their record on civil rights. I believe that anyone who does give to the Salvation Army after becoming aware of their record on civil rights has proven to my satisfaction that they don’t care all that much about civil rights. But absent some specific boasting, I’m not going to label them homophobic.
This, however, qualifies as that specific boasting, just in case you’ve forgotten it:
And did you read the quote verbatim? The first word, it’s important. I’ll even bold it since you and **mister nyx ** seem to both be missing the point I’ve regurgitated over and over in this thread.
[QUOTE=MPB in Salt Lake ]
Partly inspired by the various offenderatti upthread, I just put $15 in a Salvation Army kettle at the supermarket…
[/QUOTE]
The “partly” part. That rationale is homophobic. There’s no way around it. But as I’ve repeated before, just putting money into the kettle is not homophobic. And since MPB in Salt Lake said “partly”, I’m safely stating that there were other reasons outside of just sticking-it-to-the-“offenderatti” that they made their donation.
Great, now I’m defending a partly homophobic action, but at the same time, I’d rather do that than be slapdash with labels and more assumptions.
What the hell sort of laser micrometer do you use to measure your hair-splitting?
What a pitifully stupid observation to make.
Clearly he gives to them anyway, and the partly means that the idea of sticking it to someone else gave him the extra push to do it right then.
But even if you had just made a worthwhile statement, I’m a little lost as to why you’d want to defend the motivations of a homophobe, at all.
Thought this was in the pit at first. Personal insults and snark above redacted. Apologies.
Target scores a respectable (but not perfect) 85 on the HRC Corporate Equality Index. Their support of Emmer had nothing to do with his homophobia and everything to do with Daytons pro-tax-the-corporations platform. For which I can’t blame them too much - they are going head to head against Wal-Mart which is headquartered in a much more corporate friendly state - being headquartered in Minnesota in some ways is a competitive disadvantage for Target (and Best Buy who made similar donations to Emmer, but didn’t get near the backlash - Best Buy scores 100 on the HRC CEI).
So you’ve changed your mind about what we’re discussing again. I’ve already stipulated that the mere act of putting change in a Salvation Army kettle is not necessarily homophobic. Do you want to discuss that, or do you want to discuss “MPB in Salt Lake”? When you make up your mind let me know.
Given the paucity of information here I don’t see the point in trying to discuss this further.
I don’t know why you’re complaining about this anyway. All I said was that Target had a good gay rights record, which they do. Why exactly did that upset you so much? And why did you come up with this combative non-response at all? What exactly is your problem here?
[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
Target scores a respectable (but not perfect) 85 on the HRC Corporate Equality Index. Their support of Emmer had nothing to do with his homophobia and everything to do with Daytons pro-tax-the-corporations platform. For which I can’t blame them too much - they are going head to head against Wal-Mart which is headquartered in a much more corporate friendly state - being headquartered in Minnesota in some ways is a competitive disadvantage for Target (and Best Buy who made similar donations to Emmer, but didn’t get near the backlash - Best Buy scores 100 on the HRC CEI).
[/QUOTE]
Thanks for this. The big problem to me with railing about Target is that their biggest competition is, of course, Wal-Mart, whose record, if I remember right, has improved, but still lags far behind.
[QUOTE=stpauler]
That rationale is homophobic.
[/QUOTE]
But naturally we have to pretend that the person who does things motivated by homophobia is not a homophobe. To do otherwise would be “myopic”.
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
What the hell sort of laser micrometer do you use to measure your hair-splitting?
[/QUOTE]
Hahahaha.
For the record, I have been giving modestly to the Salvation Army for years, and in fact they are one of the ONLY organized charities I give to with any regularity (most of my other charitable giving comes from giving random homeless people a buck or two when I am feeling generous, which is of course another practice widely decried here on the good ol’ SDMB, even though some of those homeless have certainly been gay) and until reading this thread earlier this month, I had NEVER heard anything about the Salvation Army and homosexuals, and frankly, I am not necessarily convinced that they actually DO discriminate as a matter of course…
Do I hate gay people?
It’s honestly never occurred to me to hate someone based upon their sexual (or racial) preference, and if you added up all the time I have spent in San Francisco, NYC, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Barcelona (all cities with significant gay populations) it would come out to well over 5 years total, and in all that time I have never once had any negative experiences with someone that I would have identified as gay, nor have I been accused of bigotry by anyone I have ever personally met.
That said, no one is going to tell me who I can or can’t support with my $$$, and nothing that I have read in this thread has convinced me that someone who gives a few bucks to a SA bell ringer at Christmas time is a hate filled bigot, so unless I read some believable evidence that persuades me otherwise, I will continue to assume that this is just another non issue that gives a select vocal minority of perpetually pissed off people something to rail against while feeling forever victimized by, which is apparently appealing to them on some level.
Wow, I didn’t realize it was an either/or situation and that we could only discuss one point or another.
I’m just asking for proof of your claim that Target matched donations. If you don’t have it, fine. I never remember seeing it happen, that doesn’t mean it didn’t of course. But don’t make a claim and then act all indignant when someone calls you on the carpet for proof.
And now you have a response from MPB in Salt Lake, I’m curious if their actions based on the facts still falls into that homophobic bucket in your opinion or not.
I imagine the OP is too busy feeding and clothing the homeless this Christmas to post any more for now, so best leave it until after the holidays.