My latest Wonkette piece is up, and I decided to use this week’s post to have a little fun with all of the various boycotts gays and those who hate them are ginning up right now. It’s hard to keep track, so hopefully this will help:
ACTION ALERT! You may not be aware that there are products and services you are supposed to be boycotting right now, so your Wonkette reporter of homosexuals is here to save the day! Things used to be much simpler, back when the American Family Association was boycotting McDonald’s for their excessive gayness, by leaving hilarious comments on the internet about how their Real ‘Murkan families didn’t NEED no Big Macs, and could just suck their trans fats through a straw, like Jesus taught them in the Bible.
He’s referring to it as “our boycott,” which has me worried that he’s teetering on the precipice between his usual insanity and all-out, strait-jacket required, mental illness. Also, he is glad he is boycotting McDonalds, because it’s keeping him from getting fatter. Also, he dares the gay community to “negate our boycott,” but warns that we will get fat if we do.
This is all over that French “Come as You Are” commercial, by the way. He is very mad at McDonalds for promoting the “disease-producing lifestyle” of gayness to French teenagers. Apparently no one ever taught Peter how to put on a damn condom.
To sum up: Peter LaBarbera, not currently eating at McDonalds, mad about a French teevee commercial, wishes the gays would negate his boycott so he could be the skinny girl in school for the first time, like, ever.
Stating clearly that McDonald’s advertising will not acknowledge the existence of lesbian or gay diners in the United States — and that such advertising may be withdrawn elsewhere around the world — the company’s chief operations officer Don Thompson had this to say to the Chicago Tribune:
Thompson: (We talk) about things that may have an implication in one part of the world and may be the cultural norm in another part of the world. And those are things that, yes, we’re going to learn from. But, you’re right, that commercial won’t show in the United States.
Chicago Tribune: How has it done in France?
Thompson: Interestingly enough, there have been no negatives coming out of France. The brand is a local brand and different things will occur in different parts of the world. We just have to make sure that we understand the impact one action may make on another part of the world.
Translation: McDonald’s does not wish to offend bigots in its central African and Islamist market territories, so in the interest of global cohesion, McDonald’s will ostracize certain minorities from its advertising all over the world.
Gays are not the only demographic that is stigmatized in nether regions of the world; Jews are verboten throughout the Arab world, and Hispanics are unwelcome in the American Southwest.
Can we expect them to be ostracized, as well, by a Christian Right operations chief who bases corporate “core values” upon the prejudices of the world’s most primitive and oppressive places?
So, we have seen a Hispanic People Magazine cover with Ricky Martin and his children. And, a French McDonald’s commercial. The tag line for the television spot is: “Come as you are, just leave a little fatter.”
Okay, I added the last part.
How about a little love here in the good ole’ USof A? It is amazing how our religious right has, in many ways, relegated our country to the cultural backwaters.
Memo to the American Family Association: It is fair to say that your 2008 McDonald’s boycott has officially failed.
