... go read today's Manhattan User's Guide.
We never had Welch's Grape Juice in the house growing up because Robert Welch was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, and that organization, still with us, opposed the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s.
Which brings us to a piece of jewelry we mentioned recently in MUG, available, as we noted, at Anthropologie. A reader better informed than we are pointed out that both Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters are owned by Richard Hayne.
Jonathan Valania wrote an excellent piece on Hayne in the Philadelphia Weekly a few years ago in which he reported that Hayne had donated $13,150 to Rick Santorum and his PAC over the years. (Santorum, as you'll recall, is anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and in favor of teaching intelligent design.)
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Great history in the philly weekly piece. Who knew? especially the Hicks White Dog connection. No to Santorum!
And the only people that get hurt when people don't shop at those stores is the employees and fellow liberal minded people who don't own 26,000,000 shares of stock like Richard Hayne. Can we think this through? That company's employees have more piercings,tattoos, and liberal motivations than St Mark's Place on a Friday night and the vast majority of them are dependent on the stores' sales to have a job to pay the rent. What do you think happens when stores don't sell merchandise? Do you think Richard Hayne won't contribute $13000 dollars to Rick Santorum, when he is a billionaire already? The only people who get hurt in your boycott scenario are the employees who live paycheck to paycheck and are the first to lose their jobs when sales go south. Let's think this through before we try to punish someone for their political beliefs.....
I agree with Thad. Urban Outfitters had to pull their "chinese takeout" shirts off the shelves as well -- funny or offensive? And while I don't agree with Santorum's conservative government, he's actually gotten some snubs from his side for his work in Africa with AIDS. You can never tell.
Santorum may be OK on debt relief in Africa, but he is anti-condoms, anti-needle exchange, only supports abstinence programs, and is still anti-gay. I'm not about to give him much credit on AIDS when he doesn't care about tactics that will actually help.
See:
http://www.housingworks.org/aidsissues/rncbrooklyn.html
Thad, I can't really defend working at a store that sold "New Mexico, Cleaner than Regular Mexico" t-shirts last year.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-07-23-tshirt-urban-outfitters_x.htm?csp=34t-shirt
The boycott issue is never an easy one. Boycott Exxon and local dealers suffer the consequences, etc., it's a personal choice and difficult to keep up with. Sanatorium is a pin-head, but this whole concept of image and store branding is fascinating.
Charlie: the chinese takeout T-shirts were Abercrombie and Fitch. And they also had a chinese laundry one: "Two Wongs will make it White" (So bad on so many levels....)
Barry: I was not defending the choices that that company makes in putting stuff on their shelves, but rather the short-sightedness that some of us engage in when we discover a nugget like the Hayne-Santorum connection. And as far as New Mexico/Old Mexico...that's pretty damn funny. We all need to relax our collective sphincters on some of these little things and focus on the bigger issues at hand: like African HIV, like Darfur, and yes even the plan by Starbucks to have 40,000 global stores. It is a scary thought that one company could have that much leverage in a single commodity market. But I digress...the jobby job job type job job calls.....
Being from New Mexico, it is pretty damn funny.
Thanks, Thad, for that and other level-headed comments.