The AFA and Ford Motor Company

[MrsNormanMaine[$]]

Ford motor company recently sat down with the American Family Association and, in order to avoid a threatened boycott, agreed to withdraw its corporate support from gay/lesbian publications and events.

This bothers me very much as a gay man. The AFA would like nothing better than to see me and my kind disappear and, if they are successful in this way with corporate America, visible images of gay/lesbian people will become less frequent. Culture in our country, like it or not, is driven by the advertising dollar.

I'm wondering what group the AFA will start targeting next? It might be you.

Link to story

MNM

[erik_kosberg]

Yeah, it sure looks like they caved but they’re not entirely ending advertising targetd at the GLBT community. The Volvo brand will still be advertised. But their “business decision” explanation sure does seem suspect.

[theworm[$]]

I saw this story on TV last night, and it made me sick.
So much for social responsibility.

[erik_kosberg]

You've really got to wonder what the management at Ford was smoking.

[realtraveller]

Ford just announced its closing 8 plants. In its weak financial state, Ford may not have wanted to fight a boycott. They may not make decent cars and they may no longer have spines, but Ford management can still do math. I suppose sometimes boycotts do work.

[lynnzop[$]]

I heard this today. American Family Association, my @ss. Breeders of hatred and contempt. What century are we living in again?

[erik_kosberg]

Might not this backfire on Ford?

[soxfan[$]]

One can only hope.

[hadassahchana[$]]

Yep, from your mouth to God's ears, Erik.

After listening to a talkshow host, can't remember his name, go on and on about what makes a family, and discovering to my great surprise that the boys and I are not a family, I have had the greatest loathing for these idjits. Now, Ford has slipped into first place in that race. unbelievable.



Cindy

[drmomentum[$]]

In its hoped-for rise to power, the American Family Association is tryign whatever it can. The boycott of Target, now choosing a financially troubled company that would fear a boycott.

This will embolden them further in their meddling nutfudgery.

-JP

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

Online write-a-letter-to-Ford drives have started, so perhaps if Ford feels they'll lose more customers than the AFA's boycott would have done, they'll change their mind.

[realtraveller]

Ford just announced they are laying off 30,000 workers.

[Redlass]

I heard about this on NPR, but I was somewhat disappointed in the reporting. Ford claimed that it was cutting back advertising across the board--not in response to AFA.

But no one asked what other advertising had been dropped. Have they stopped advertising anywhere else?

[rmthunter]

AmericBlog is central to the whole Ford campaign. I think they've gone a little bit off the deep end, but then, AFA tends to make me go into hunt/kill mode, too.

And Ford is not changing its antidiscrimination policies. Given Ford's financial strength right now, I can see them wanting to trim some budgets. The timing, though,makes them look really, really bad.

In the meatime, Focus on the Family will cease to do business with Wells Fargo Bank because of its support of gay causes. Wells Fargo basically said "bye-bye."

[poseidon]

realtraveller said

Ford just announced its closing 8 plants. In its weak financial state, Ford may not have wanted to fight a boycott. They may not make decent cars and they may no longer have spines, but Ford management can still do math. I suppose sometimes boycotts do work.

That's what I was thinking as well. GM is in a similar boat, on the brink of bankruptcy. The last thing that they need is bad press.

You really need to do the math. If you've got to take into consideration that you're going to offend homosexuals or offend conservative Christians, numbers state that there are fewer homosexuals to offend. You're going to offend one group or the other, and your own survival might depend on it. So, do you do the politically-correct thing and hurt yourself severely or do you do the mathematically-correct thing and hurt yourself slightly? These are the qualitative and quantitative issues that must be considered.

As for me, I boycott Ford because they build shitty cars. One of the vehicles that we considered was the Ford 500 (settled on a Chevy Malibu instead). We were thoroughly underimpressed with the 500, despite it being built on a Volvo platform. I've been driving Tauruses since 1996 (drove a '96, '98, '00, '02 and '05) and hate hate hate them, and before we bought the Liberty, we test-drove the Escape and Michelle wasn't even interested in taking the test drive herself after being a front-seat passenger for a few miles.

Aside from that, I don't really buy into boycotts.

[poseidon]

rmthunter said

In the meatime, Focus on the Family will cease to do business with Wells Fargo Bank because of its support of gay causes. Wells Fargo basically said "bye-bye."

Which is one major reason as to why I think boycotts are worthless. You need to amass a huge following (and then have people follow through with what they say) to seriously affect a huge company. Wells Fargo is one of the largest financial institutions in the US. Focus on the Family is huge as far as an organization, but they need to be a lot bigger than they actually are in order to affect any change. Perhaps if Wells Fargo was in finance-hell they'd reconsider, but they're not, so the right reaction was, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."

On a much smaller company, a boycott can do the trick. But, the local Mom and Pops haven't done anything to piss me off.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

poseidon said

You really need to do the math. If you've got to take into consideration that you're going to offend homosexuals or offend conservative Christians, numbers state that there are fewer homosexuals to offend. You're going to offend one group or the other, and your own survival might depend on it. So, do you do the politically-correct thing and hurt yourself severely or do you do the mathematically-correct thing and hurt yourself slightly? These are the qualitative and quantitative issues that must be considered.

Or you could compare the number of people who react negatively to attempts to offend homosexuals to the number of people who react positively to such attempts -- and then your math will look quite different.

In other words, the "politically-correct" thing to do is usually the businessly-correct thing to do as well.

[poseidon]

I don't know that I agree with you, Emma. The numbers of people who would react negatively in your part of the country would react much differently in other parts of the country.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

rmthunter said

AmericBlog is central to the whole Ford campaign. I think they've gone a little bit off the deep end ...

I haven't been following the story very closely -- just been skimming AmericaBlog now and then -- and I can't figure out whether AmericaBlog is right and Ford actually did cave in to the AFA, or whether Ford's pulling the ads was just a matter of coincidental timing.

If anything, I would expect Ford to be one of the last companies to give in to that kind of pressure. The company has been making a real effort to distance itself from its embarrassing legacy -- Henry Ford had been a major supporter of the Nazis. To publicly distance themselves from that, the company has been doing things like being the sole sponsor of the TV broadcast of "Schindler's List." So if Ford were to go along with an anti-homosexual group now, that would be a kind of reversal from their previous efforts to rehabilitate their image.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

poseidon said

I don't know that I agree with you, Emma. The numbers of people who would react negatively in your part of the country would react much differently in other parts of the country.

I think that overall, in most parts of the country, people dislike bigotry, and would react negatively to attempts to offend homosexuals. There are some areas that are exceptions (maybe your part of the country is one?), but I think those really are exceptions, rather than rules.

(A lot of my sense of what the bulk of the country thinks, btw, comes from these very pages -- from reading EA. And it seems to me that EA-ers are overwhelmingly against any kind of anti-homosexual sentiment.)

[Redlass]

I guess I'm still reserving judgment. I would be angry if I thought Ford was pulling their advertising under pressure from AFA. However, I'm not going to be upset if they are making advertising decisions across the board for budget reasons. I just don't feel there is enough information or good reporting on this yet.

[erik_kosberg]

Ford could clear things up by saying something like Yes, the AFA are a bunch of scumbags who tried to threaten us. We pointedly told them to shove it where the sun don't shine. Nevertheless, time's are tough and ...

[poseidon]

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