Two days after Apple removed Exodus International’s rule-breaking antigay app from its online retail store, the app is — for thousands of people who downloaded it — alive and well.
See that picture to the right? It’s the app running on my iPad right now.
The app is still slow — so slow, in fact, that Apple’s quality-review team should have rejected it for that reason alone.
And the app still supplies its unhealthy dose of antigay and antifamily venom.
The only thing missing now is Apple’s stamp of retail approval.
Yet across the Internet, people who have not even seen the app — nor taken one moment to review the antifamily, antifaith, and antiscience advice on Exodus’ web site — are leaping at the opportunity to defend a special right among Christian Rightists to force Apple to violate its guidelines and carry apps that undermine mental health, family integrity, religious freedom, and respect for minority groups.
If Exodus really possessed a special right to force its views upon retailers’ shelves, then there would be little to stop Exodus from marching into mall-based Apple Stores and installing un-erasable NARTH e-books and Exodus website bookmarks on the desktop of every Mac Pro, iMac and iPad, right below that shiny “Macintosh HD” icon.
If “free speech” means that Exodus can tell retailers what to market, then little is stopping Exodus from marching into every Best Buy and putting its icons and e-books on every Dell, HP, and Toshiba computer, every Amazon Kindle and every Barnes & Noble Nook.
So long as Exodus tries to force retailers to hawk its merchandise, Exodus should be consistent in its logic — by allowing gay activists the same right to force Exodus’ website and bookstore to carry pro-equality media.
After all, forced speech — according to Exodus’ defenders — what “freedom of speech” is all about.
The extreme right does not care about “freedom” or “liberty” PERIOD. As long as it isn’t THEIR freedom or THEIR liberty being trampled on. I do recall the Constitution stating that they have “freedom OF religion”,however there is the other side of that sword “Freedom FROM religious persecution.”
Radical anti-gay pressure groups always demand special rights, whether it’s the right to marry; the right to ignore tax and campaign finance laws; the right to ignore any law which “conflicts” with their “conscience;” the right to wear disruptive t-shirts in schools; the right to bully in schools; the right to commit anti-gay hate crimes with no punishment; the right to not do the job they are being paid for, but not be fired; or the right to use Big Government to impose their “religious beliefs” on the rest of us. If Exodus is given another special right, the right to force merchants to sell a product, then we need to go to each of those merchants and demand that they sell ex-ex-gay apps, anti-homophobia apps, pro-gay familiy apps and pro-equality faith apps. And remind them that OUR freedom of speech is as inviolate as Exodus’.