Pro-family group targets McDonald’s
A group that opposes same-sex marriage has called for a boycott of McDonald’s, saying the fast-food giant has refused “to stay neutral in the cultural war over homosexuality.”
The American Family Association (AFA) launched the boycott this week because McDonald’s joined the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce several months ago and placed an executive on the group’s board of directors, in addition to donating to the chamber.
The association asked McDonald’s to remove itself from the chamber, but the company declined, leading to the boycott. “We’re saying that there are people who support AFA who don’t appreciate their dollars from the hamburgers they bought being put into an organization that’s going to fight against the values they believe in,” Tim Wildmon, the association’s president, said this week.
“Hatred has no place in our culture,” McDonald’s USA spokesman Bill Whitman said. “That includes McDonald’s, and we stand by and support our people to live and work in a society free of discrimination and harassment.”
In March, the association ended a two-year boycott of Ford after the automaker largely stopped advertising its Volvo, Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles in the gay media. The association also has boycotted retailer Target for substituting “holiday” for “Christmas” in its advertising and the Walt Disney Co. for its “embrace of the homosexual lifestyle.”
Corporations increasingly are courting the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender markets for their buying power and trendsetting value. This translates into corporate sponsorships of events, such as gay pride festivals, and advertising targeted at nonheterosexual consumers.
As a result, faith-based groups such as the AFA are following the example practiced for years by the secular left, which has targeted corporations for their policies on environmental, workplace and human-rights issues.
The AFA “exists to motivate and equip citizens to change the culture to reflect biblical truth and traditional family values,” the group’s Web site reads. The organization, based in Tupelo, Miss., has 2.8 million people on its e-mail alert system and sends its monthly magazine to 170,000 people, Wildmon said.
Wildmon said his group wants McDonald’s to give up its membership in the chamber, which is located in Washington’s Dupont Circle, next year and to remove its logo from the chamber’s Web site. “I think the request we’re making is more than fair,” Wildmon said.
A call to chamber president Justin G. Nelson was not returned.
Ascertaining the impact of such boycotts can be tricky. Ford’s monthly sales slumped at times during the AFA boycott, but so did those of General Motors, DaimlerChrysler and Toyota. The boycott coincided with an industrywide slide in sales of SUVs and trucks, Ford’s core products.
Ford, which has sold its Jaguar and Land Rover lines, said gay-oriented ads constituted a small slice of its marketing budget. When cuts were made, mainstream-market advertising was reduced, while niche advertising was all but eliminated.