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Leatherby’s Boycott Melts–The Inside Scoop
Supporters line out the door in support of Family Ice Cream Parlor, delivering a humiliating defeat to protesters

Leatherby’s was targeted Sunday for protest by No on 8 supporters because owner Alan Leatherby, his business, and his relatives gave a total of $20,000 supporting the “Yes on 8″ campaign. Proposition 8 was a measure passed by California voters on Nov. 4 that put a ban on gay marriage in the state.

The inside scoop from the front lines on the Leatherby’s boycott is that Leatherby’s loyal supporters pommeled the opposition. Standing in front of the store holding signs and giving away free ice cream, the dozen or so protesters were perplexed by the stream of constant customers.

http://beetlebabee.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/leatherbys-boycott-melts/

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The state did nothing, a religion did. A religion who went against it’s own doctrine and who broke a promise they made to their God (a promise they have been breaking for a while now, just not to this extent).

If you’re not familiar with it the Mormon religion has a book called the Doctrine and Covenants, which is literally what it sounds like. It’s the doctrine that they should be preaching and living by and it’s a list of the covenants (sacred promises) they make to their God when they get baptized, and they broke it.

D&C 134:9
” 9 We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government, whereby one religious society is fostered and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members, as citizens, denied.”

There it is in black and white, written in millions of copies of their book. Their prophet who condoned using the church’s official web site to spew forth their political agenda has broken a promise to his God and so has any member who is using their faith as a scapegoat.

Not only do we live in a country where there is supposed to be a clear division of church and state (that’s one of the big reasons our forefathers fled England) but for this particular religion their God has told them that it is not just to mingle civil government with influence.

They have denied people their rights and they have mixed government with their religion, went against their own doctrine and have broken a sacred promise to their God. Flat out what they did is wrong as prescribed by the tenants of their own religion, and the 50+%of us in UT who are not mormon* and the even greater percentage of us who had nothing to do with this should not be punished for the sins of a religion.

*I say 50+% because I’m taking into account people like me who had our names in the church’s logs but were not active in any sense. Which I am not even on the longs anymore since the night of the last big protest. Which I might add had over 3,000 people who were against the church show up and less than 40 who were for the church. Even the church’s “faithful” didn’t show up to defend the erroneous actions of their religion.

I care that it does harm. It really does harm. It doesn’t matter that some abstract set of rules say somehow, magically, it doesn’t cause harm when we do it with special words or magic pieces of paper. People who did nothing wrong will suffer because a bunch of people are choosing to attack them financially because they are angry. Real reality, not a legislated reality made out of words where as long as you hurt people certain ways, then its ok. You know, reality. Where the hungry people are.

And you are also willfully avoiding the fact that the arms dealer is actually the person dealing arms and the meat industry actually sells meat, thus choosing not to participate in those industries causes only those people harm who are actually connected to what is being opposed. The state of Utah, the Sundance Film Festival, their tourism industy, their state infrastructure, none of that had a single thing to do with Prop. 8.

When you decide to buy groceries from a local store instead of WalMart, when you choose to buy a sweater because it uses organic cotton, you are making exactly the same kind of decision.

I’m not raising technicalities here – a boycott is simply a coordinated way of doing something that we do anyway.

If you choose to be a vegetarian, there are cow farmers to whom you are doing harm. If everyone became a vegetarian, some people would become poor. If everyone stopped littering, some people would go poor. If violent crime stopped, some people would go poor.

@Andrew: By the same token, those that supported Prop. 8 did no one any harm. They just organized and were active politically. Rights are given through a political process, thus when the vote came down there were no “rights” for them to be impinging. Except that’s just not reality.

Reality is organized activities like this cause harm, their activity to pass Prop. 8 caused harm and this boycott will cause harm. Maybe under some sort of legalistic thinking that’s not causing harm, but in the really real world, organizing a boycott on an entire state attacks their economy and infrastructure, causing suffering. This is harm, and the choice to cause harm. If you want to be legalistic and say “No, it’s just withholding money” you are willfully choosing to ignore the consequences of doing it, just as those who say “It’s not discrimination or bigotry, it’s defending God’s will” are willfully ignoring that, in this case, defending their god’s will leads to discrimination and bigotry. This is a basic concept of contingency…if I organize an agenda that will cause harm as an obvious and foreseen consequence, then I am the cause of that harm.

A boycott is organized with exactly the goal of causing harm…harm to a bottom line, and thus to motivate change in the agency boycotted. Otherwise there is no point, and we don’t organize it, people just don’t buy things.

Besides, it just doesn’t pass the “straight face” test. What other goal does the boycott have except punishment and revenge? It won’t give anyone any rights, won’t change the law in California, won’t help a single person do anything but feel a vindictive sense of joy. But the economic cost will be massive for residents of Utah, none of whom, you know, VOTED in the California election.

If you decide not to buy machine guns from an illegal arms dealer, should you responsible for his children?

The state of Utah has made a decision that consumers disagree with. Consumer patronage is a privilege you have to earn, it is no one’s right.

A boycott is not revenge – it is simply consumers exercising their rights in a coordinated way. The only reason they need to coordinate is that these organizations are so large that a sense of futility stops us from doing it alone.

- andrew at the point dot com

I am a resident of Salt Lake City who voted for Obama and was saddened by the passing of Prop 8.

Most residents of Salt Lake City and Park City are liberals. The rest of the state, especially Utah Valley (home of BYU) and the rural areas are very conservative.

Park City, where the Sundance Independent Film Festival is held, is a very progressive town. It would be the area most affected by a drop in ski tourism. A boycott on tourism would actually be like shooting your allies.

Yes, we want to do something to make a difference, but I agree with you that punishment is not the answer. It will only cause further polarization and a “me vs. you” mentality.

For same-sex couple rights to be accepted in society, we need more integration, more understanding, and more acceptance of each other as people.

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