In his July 5 WorldNetDaily column, Joseph Farah declares that his endorsement of the right-wing American Family Association’s boycott of McDonald’s is “something you won’t see anywhere else in the media” because “McDonald’s advertising dollars are coveted by news companies throughout the U.S. and around the world.” He then asserts that he doesn’t “have the same concerns and fear of loss as the rest of the media crowd” and that “I no more want McDonald’s advertising in WND during this boycott than I would solicit advertising from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Don’t want it. Don’t need it.”
But Farah offers no evidence that WND has ever accepted advertising in the past from McDonald’s. If, as we suspect, Mickey D’s has never advertised on WND, Farah is giving up nothing and taking no financial or personal risk by boycotting the company.
Further, WND has accepted — and still accepts — an ad from a company that sells a T-shirt that says, “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.” So for Farah to declare the moral high ground here — “I believe in absolute standards of right and wrong as enumerated in the Bible” — rings hollow. Unless, of course, he believes that lynching journalists is somehow proscribed by the Bible.
Farah also asserts that McDonald’s, through its membership in the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce — over which the AFA called the boycott — is “promot[ing] of the radical homosexual agenda including same-sex marriage.” But neither Farah nor the July 3 WND article announcing the AFA’s boycott offers any evidence to support its claim that the NGLCC, in the July 3 article’s words, “lobbies Congress on a wide range of issues, including the promotion of same-sex marriage.” Further, not even the AFA’s boycott website offers evidence that the NGLCC lobbies in favor of same-sex marriage.
Instead, what Farah offers is a lot of scare tactics in place of actual facts. Farah uses the word “radical” four times, three coupled with “agenda.”
In an interesting aside, the July 3 article perhaps demonstrates the weakness of the evidence in support of a boycott by beginning two different paragraphs explaining what the AFA isn’t boycotting:
“This boycott is not about hiring homosexuals, or homosexuals eating at McDonald’s or how homosexual employees are treated. It is about McDonald’s, as a corporation, choosing to put the full weight of their organization behind promoting the homosexual agenda, including homosexual marriage,” said AFA chairman Donald E. Wildmon.
[…]“We are not telling McDonald’s who they can hire to work for the company, nor are we demanding that they stop serving Big Macs to homosexual customers,” AFA said then.
So, are gays allow to be McDonald’s franchisees, or to operate any business that caters to people other than gays? After all, helping business owners is the prime function of the NGLCC. Wildmon and the AFA folks don’t answer that question — and neither does Farah.
A friendly piece of advice for Farah: Less hate, more facts. That way, you might attract more mainstream advertisers — and, thus, demonstrate some actual risk should you decide to boycott them.