Issues@Hand
AFA initiatives, Christian activism, news briefs
August 1996 – For several months, the American Family Association has been alone in calling for an official boycott of the Disney empire. Now the largest protestant denomination in the country is also calling for its members to stop supporting the company’s anti-family policies and practices. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and its 16 million members are fed up with Disney’s endorsement of the homosexual lifestyle, production and distribution of anti-family/anti-Christian books and movies and a shunning of the very consumer that built the empire. “The Disney Company is not the same Disney it was years ago when we were growing up,” said Nancy Victory, SBC Resolutions Committee chair.
AFA President Donald Wildmon is grateful to see the Baptists align in the battle against Disney. “The momentum of boycotts continues to grow and with the addition of the Southern Baptist Convention, Disney will start to realize that its tactics are losing favor with more and more people.” Wildmon also called on other denominations to pick up the standard. “You can’t deny the strength of numbers.”
Those numbers are already starting to grow. The Texas Catholic, the newspaper of the Dallas Diocese, is urging its readers to join the boycott. Editor Bronson Havard writes, “The message that the Southern Baptists sent to the Walt Disney Company speaks louder on some of the same concerns often expressed by Catholics.”
Disney does not appear to be fazed by the prospect of cutting off 16 million customers. After the Southern Baptist Convention resolution was passed, Disney issued a statement saying it could not understand how a group could ask the company to deny health benefits to anyone, a reference to Disney’s extending health-care benefits to the homosexual partners of its employees – an inconsistent position since Disney doesn’t make the same offer to the live-in partners of its unmarried heterosexual employees. Traditional values would exclude both extramarital arrangements, but Disney clearly discriminates in favor of homosexual partners.
Even with the overwhelming evidence of its anti-family activities, Disney’s public relations machine appears puzzled that the company would be boycotted. “We find it curious that a group that claims to espouse family values would vote to boycott the world’s largest producer of wholesome family entertainment,” concluded the Disney statement. 
