“Target, practically everyone’s favorite discount retail store, is headquartered in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. But along with precious bodies of water, Minnesota is home to some pretty rabid anti-gay politicians and groups. Among them include Tom Emmer. And Target, it seems, is apparently filling his campaign coffers with nearly $150,000.

Follow the money. At least, that’s the message delivered by an article at sfist.com by Matt Baume, who tracks $150,000 from Target’s coffers, through a political action committee (PAC) known as Minnesota Forward, all the way to Tom Emmer, who himself supports a Christian rock band in Minnesota that travels around the state saying that it’s moral and righteous for religious people to kill gays and lesbians.

For those into algebra, it looks a little like this: Target + Minnesota Forward + Tom Emmer = Support for a rather dangerous and radical political philosophy that diminishes LGBT people to pests that should be murdered. And Target is cool with this?

Send the company a message right now, urging them to explain why their money is being used to fund a politics that not only serves to prevent LGBT equality, but breeds homophobia, transphobia and hatred.”

- Change.org

‘like’ the facebook group here.

Additionally, you should boycott Target because they are funding Emmer’s anti-immigrant politics (he called Arizona’s SB 1070 “a wonderful start”) and his anti-worker politics (he called for eliminating or reducing minimum wage laws).  And, of course, Target enacts massive exploitation everyday all over the world, like every capitalist corporation.

adailyriot:

abbyjean:

A PAC called MN Forward raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few weeks. MN Forward is using that money to run ads in support of Emmer, a Republican [candidate for MN governor]. Target, long headquartered in Minneapolis, was one of the four corporate patrons of MN Forward. They forked over $100,000 cash and another $50,000 of in-kind goods and services. It’s an odd move for a corporation that expresses support for gay rights.

Target’s support for MN Forward and Emmer is surprising. Emmer’s a candidate who isn’t just indifferent about gay rights; he’s outright hostile. Despite claiming to be for freedom and personal liberty, Emmer’s name appears on the author line of constitutional legislature “protecting” traditional marriage. Target says its support is for candidates who will “directly effect the company’s retail agenda.” And that’s likely true. But Target’s backing of a pro-corporation candidate (who might not even win) for short term tax-break profit in exchange for permanently undoing a reputation its worked hard to nurture—well, that’s not a good idea. Activists are already upset.

Target is giving every American, nearly literally, a vote with his or her dollar. So, self-respecting progressive Americans who profess to support the gay community, it’s put up or shut-up time; here is your chance to go beyond complaining about the Citizens United ruling and actually act to define what a strict “business interest” is. Citizens United is counting on you doing nothing.

(Target CEO: Gregg.Steinhafel@target.com; Target PR Head of Community Giving: kristenj@imrecommunications.com)

Boycott Target! —> Join this facebook page: “Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics”

• “By making our military a league of heroes, we ensure that the brutalizing aspects and effects of war will be played down. In celebrating isolated heroic feats, we often forget that war is guaranteed to degrade humanity. “War,” as writer and cultural historian Louis Menand noted, “is specially terrible not because it destroys human beings, who can be destroyed in plenty of other ways, but because it turns human beings into destroyers.”
• When we create a legion of heroes in our minds, we blind ourselves to evidence of their destructive, sometimes atrocious, behavior. Heroes, after all, don’t commit atrocities. They don’t, for instance, dig bullets out of pregnant women’s bodies in an attempt to cover up deadly mistakes. They don’t fire on a good Samaritan and his two children as he attempts to aid a grievously wounded civilian. Such atrocities and murderous blunders, so common to war’s brutal chaos, produce cognitive dissonance in the minds of many Americans who simply can’t imagine their “heroes” killing innocents. How much easier it is to see the acts of violence of our troops as necessary, admirable, even noble.
• By making our military generically heroic, we act to prolong our wars. By seeing war as essentially heroic theater, we esteem it even as we excuse it. Consider, for example, Germany during World War I, a subject I’ve studied and written about. Now, as then, and here, as there, the notion of war as heroic theater became common. And when that happens, war’s worst excesses are conveniently softened on the “home front,” which only contributes to more war-making. As the historian Robert Weldon Whalen noted of those German soldiers of nearly a century ago, “The young men in field-grey were, first of all, not just soldiers, but young heroes, Junge Helden. They fought in the heroes’ zone, Heldenzone, and performed heroic deeds, Heldentaten. Wounded, they shed hero’s blood, Heldenblut, and if they died, they suffered a hero’s death, Heldentod, and were buried in a hero’s grave, Heldengrab.” The overuse of helden as a modifier to ennoble German militarism during World War I may prove grating to our ears today, but honestly, is it that much different from America’s own celebration of our troops as young heroes (with all the attendant rites)?
• By insisting programmatically on American military heroism, we also lay a firm foundation for potentially dangerous post-war myths, especially of the blame-mongering “stab-in-the-back” variety. After all, once you have a league of heroes, how can you assign responsibility for costly, debilitating, perhaps even lost wars to them? It’s just a fact that heroes don’t lose. And if they’re not responsible, and their brilliant, super-competent leaders (General “King David” Petraeussprings to mind) aren’t responsible — then it’s only a small step to assigning blame to weak-willed civilians and so-called unpatriotic elements on the “home front,” especially since we’re not likely to credit our enemies for much. By definition, cravenly hiding among civilians as they do, our enemies are just about incapable of behaving heroically.

(via adailyriot: clingtomymouth)