“WARNING! THIS SCENE IS VERY OFFENSIVE…”

The AFA apparently hasn’t yet had enough. I’m not at all surprised, though. The ‘brains’ behind this grandstanding Pharisee busybody outfit know that their activities aren’t going to make an appreciable dent in Ford sales. As commenter “Hey” says at The Carpetbagger Report, the AFA honchos know that Ford is already struggling (due to the decreased buying power of its market, and just because it has been Ford for too long), so they are stepping up their rhetoric in the hopes of claiming a kill over a beast that’s currently dying of natural causes. Brave hunters, they.

Another point of note is the language of the proposed boycott. It accuses of Ford of supporting a homosexual agenda. Actually, I believe Ford has a selling-cars agenda, but I’m not a homo-hating bigot, so what do I know? Seriously, though, if you look at the AFA’s track record, it would appear that they are less concerned about promoting Christian family values than they are about stirring up a lot of fearful, hateful (and self-promoting) noise.

As I said in my last post regarding this issue, the AFA has the right– within the constraints of the law– to organize and protest whatever it wants. However, it is worth noting that they aren’t protesting any actual harm to any of their own ostensible members. They are bitching, moaning, and agitating over the personal choices and lifestyles of other consenting adults. The AFA is appealing not only to bigotry and fear, but to the worst of their target market’s busybody instincts. That’s why most of their campaigns target media output (ads, TV shows, etc.) and family-friendly household names (Ford, Disney, etc.); they know that most of their target market (ignorant, fearful bigots) probably gets its view of the outside world from the TV (if Howard Beale is to be believed, anyway). In other words, the AFA cherry-picks targets that its slow-witted, easily bothered followers will most easily relate to.

I don’t put much stock in the effectiveness of the AFA to do much more than promote itself and keep its ‘braintrust’ well-fed, but groups like this still bear watching. All three branches of our federal government are currently dominated by political operatives who have made careers out of pandering to the same constituency as the AFA, and history has taught us that hatred and irrational fear– when effectively politicized and organized– can have catastrophically deadly effects. Doing so in Jesus’ name should only make it more repellent to those who call themselves Christian.