Former senior Bush White House officials negotiated anti-gay deal for Ford
Oh doesn’t this get interesting. The two Ford execs who sat down with the extremist gay-hating organization to work out the secret deal, who do you think they were? Why, two former senior Bush administration officials. Aren’t things getting interesting.
John Aravosis at AmericaBlog has continuing coverage on the noxious Ford agreement with the extreme right to stop advertising in LGBT media. He’s organizing hard against it, and as he points today, two days after the story broke, it’s already getting major media coverage. He’s not just reporting the news either, he’s playing a major role in leading the attack against Ford too, an excellent example of how blogs can play a major role in activism.
Tag: homophobia
Ford has insisted that this is strictly a “business decision.” If Ford really just decided to pull the ads because they weren’t effective, then why is Donald Wildmon so smugly declaring victory?
This “business decision” is the crux of the problem. We’ve been making great headway in Corporate America by arguing the “business case” for diversity. Offering domestic partnership benefits doesn’t cost much, but attracts highly talented employees, we’ve argued successfully. Promoting respect and inclusion increases productivity, we attest, because employees who are respected do better work. We don’t bother to argue that it’s simply the right thing to do.
HRC, which rates companies on a 100-point Corporate Equality Index, explains that corporations are becoming more gay friendly because “fairness is good for business.”
But that makes for a dangerous equation. If the AFA folks buy more Fords than we do, we lose. Justice cannot be denied just because it doesn’t make money. It may be that Ford has concluded that an Equality Index score of 100 isn’t the right mark to aim for. They may decide to go for a sweet spot where the fundamentalists leave them alone; maybe an 82 or a 76.
The bottom line is, indeed, the bottom line. Ford is a corporation that exists to make money. As long as “shareholder value” is the only value that matters in Corporate America, Donald Wildmon will continue to carve
notches into his belt.
Read more of this excerpt at Marty’s Musings.