Thursday, November 13, 2008

Same Sex Marriage Black List

While driving home from the office today, I was listening to the CBS evening news and heard a piece about how the ban on gay marriage in California that recently passed is affecting local businesses. It seems that if you contributed to the campaign to ban gay marriage, this fact is part of the public record, so proponents of gay marriage have created a black list encouraging people to black list those businesses that contributed to the campaign to ban gay marriage. Is this right? Should your political and social views be part of the public record and should people be able to publish those views and encourage people to hurt these people's businesses? I would love to hear people's thoughts on this subject. Please post your opinion here.

1 comment:

dragonmctt said...

While I believe that voting itself should remain private, I agree that supporting a group that is attempting to change legislation that may affect all of us should be public information. A person's political and social views are only private if they are not divulged. If you are going out of your way to make a financial contribution to an action group, you should be held accountable for that. If a business is not willing to support members of their community, the community members should be able to make a choice not to support the business.

This would be similar to not buying clothes from a certain store because they farm work out to child labor in third world countries. Or not buying an album from an artist who has a shady history you may not agree with. As consumers, we have a duty to inform ourselves about who we are supporting in the marketplace, just as in the political arena. Our own political and social views determine who we support with our money, but everyone should be entitled to that information if the business initiates action to take a stand on an issue.