Buster Wilson today suggested conservatives boycott Google for the search engine and advertising giant’s recently announced “Legalize Love” campaign to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. Wilson, general manager of the American Family Association‘s radio stations and technically Bryan Fischer‘s boss, acknowledges a boycott against Google “is going be tough,” and will “test the meat of our convictions.”
I said that I did not want to support any efforts like this, in fact, we are a part of boycotting efforts similar to this with other businesses. This is going to be hard for a lot of us. A lot of us are so integrated into Google and Google products, this is going to be a tough one. It’s more than just a search engine — many of us have Android phones the Android system is a Google product. Many of us use Google calendar and Google task, and Gmail, and all those kinds of things. YouTube and all the other things — it’s not just the search engine. So this is going be tough. This one’s going to be one of those situations where I guess we’ll test the meat of our convictions.
Google’s new “Legalize Love” campaign, as The New Civil Rights Movement reported yesterday, is not about legalizing same-sex marriage around the world — as many had mistakenly reported — but it is about supporting workers in countries that criminalize homosexuality, and it’s designed to secure safety for LGBT people in countries where it’s illegal to be LGBT.
However much someone hates homosexuality, isn’t it evil to boycott a company that wants to save the lives of its own LGBT workers? At what point do Americans of good conscience denounce the American Family Association as not only radical and hateful, but harmful?
The American Family Association is a certified anti-gay hate group that uses it’s almost 200-member radio station network to reach about one million listeners daily, and also has outreach programs like One Million Moms, an email harvesting and low-cost fundraising operation.
Right Wing Watch’s Brian Tashman, who provided the video, below, adds that “If the AFA goes ahead with its Google boycott, the group will also have to boycott Google’s rival Microsoft as the company recently endorsed marriage equality.”
Of course, Apple has long been a public supporter of same-sex marriage and LGBT rights, so that’s out.
Hopefully, some enterprising reporter will do a study on all Google, Microsoft, and Apple products, identifying which companies perform the same services, and make products in the same categories (operating systems, cell phones, computers, search engines, advertising…), and find the companies that don’t support LGBT rights and marriage equality. A short list, I would imagine.
Pretty sure the AFA will soon be talking on tin cans connected by string and sending messages via carrier pigeon or smoke signals.