Consumer Freedom?

As reported most recently in the New York Times , a small number of advocates are putting some of the nation’s largest retailers, including Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Wal-Mart, on the spot for their indirect funneling of money to Christian non-profits that denounce homosexual practice and gay marriage.

Considering the hardly noticeable support given the conservative non-profits by the retail giants, we get some strong words: Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center are once again describing Christian organizations like the Family Research Council as “hate groups,” while in the other corner, Mike Huckabee has called the petition efforts “economic terrorism,” an infringement on consumer freedom. One wonders whether advocates are genuinely concerned that Apple and Microsoft’s negligibly indirect support of the Family Research Council is offending homosexuals, or they are simply reaping the benefits of our culture’s heightened sensitivity. Perhaps both.

Either way, the case points to something beyond itself. Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address reads: “If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—its universality.” In a culture that is doing its best to affirm homosexuality as “right,” it does seem as though all efforts to oppose it are assumed to be “themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.”