The wisdom of weighing a matter before acting

You may have missed the news that the American Family Association suspended its boycott of the Walt Disney Co. a couple of months ago.

After nine years, the AFA - a Mississippi-based Christian advocacy organization led by the Rev. Don Wildmon - decided it had made its point.

Maybe you don't remember what that point was. OK, the AFA - joined by some other groups, including the Southern Baptist Convention - had concluded that Disney was way too gay-friendly.

Walt's old outfit allowed groups to organize mass tours to Walt Disney World, for example, that the the organizers touted as "gay days." Some of Disney's various branches - Miramax films and Hyperion Press, for example - were producing movies and books with sympa-thetic gay characters, they said. Even the G-rated movies were filled with perversion, such as the parson in "The Little Mermaid" who - in a frame-by-frame analysis, the AFA alleged - appeared to be sexually aroused. And Disney had the audacity to provide such things as health and insurance benefits to the partners of its gay and lesbian employees.

You can understand the outrage.

Or maybe - like most Americans, apparently - you cannot.

The thing is, I've been able to find no independent analysis of the boycott that indicates it had any appreciable impact on Disney. The company had some financial troubles during the boycott period, but they were largely attributable to the economy, bad programming at ABC, and to 9/11's virtual shutdown of tourism for a couple of years.

AFA's next target:

Ford Motor Company

Now, the AFA has targeted the Ford Motor Company.

Ford, it seems, makes Disney look like a piker on gay issues. It spends millions of dollars supporting the nebulous "gay agenda," the AFA says. It advertises in gay-oriented periodicals, apparently fully willing to sell its vehicles to homosexuals. Its Volvo division gives money to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. It gave the kingly sum of $5,000 to Detroit's Motor City Pride Weekend last year. The company apparently endorses the idea of treating gay and lesbian employees equally with its heterosexual employees. And, get this, it loaned three cars to be used in a gay pride parade in Germany, then donated a subcompact called a Ka as the top prize in a drawing to benefit people with AIDS in Cologne. Truly outrageous.

Of course, if you read the AFA's original Web site on the boycott, you'd think Ford invented the idea of gay marriage and basically wants gays and lesbians to take over the world.

But that site recently was shunted to the AFA background after Wildmon met with a group of Ford dealers who, he says, will now "communicate directly with Ford officials regarding AFA's concern over the company's support for the homosexual 'marriage' movement." So the boycott has been postponed until December.

Enough with

the harking back

It's probably too bad the dealers involved didn't read up on the "success" of the Disney boycott before getting too concerned about this threat.

Christianity's successes, it seems to me, are rooted not in its attempts to revive some halcyon past - which usually never existed, anyway - but in its potential to set the future.

When the AFA and others were boycotting Disney, they pointed with pride to the early Disney films as examples of a wholesome Christian past that Walt Disney himself helped create. But even a cursory knowledge of the Disney film catalog exposes the truth that Walt was careful to almost never delve into matters of religion.

His films were peopled with witches and goblins and ghosts and fairies (the magical kind), and humans who were at the mercy of spells and incantations. In his most artistically lauded creation, "Fantasia," Walt included a sorcerer, a satyr, naked women, and had a set of secular lyrics written for "Ave Maria" to conclude the film.

A Christian champion? Hardly. In fact, it's hard to imagine that Wildmon, et al, would not be roundly condemning those early films if they were just being issued.

We all have not only a right but an obligation to judiciously decide where to spend our money. If you object to Ford giving money to gay causes or providing benefits to same-sex couples, by all means refuse to buy their products if you wish.

But we should come to that decision after careful deliberation, weighing a range of considerations - including the ethical problem of punishing the employees of a company for policies they don't set.

Cody Lowe's column runs Saturday in Extra.