Feel-Good Bigotry

The Amazon shareholders meeting had a lot of protesters at the Seattle Center yesterday, essentially protesting that Amazon does not adhere to its own policies.

It all started when Pascal Tessier, a gay Eagle Scout from Maryland gathered more than 120,000 signatures from people who wanted to encourage Amazon to drop the Boy Scouts of American from the list of non-profit organization that shoppers can designate to receive donations from the Amazon Smile program. (Smile allows customers to have some portion of their purchase go to charity. It’s like a do-gooder rewards program, instead of miles you earn good karma.)

As GLAD graphically points out, Amazon has a published criteria for organizations to be eligible for their Smile program. To be eligible for Amazon customers’ largess, an organization must “not engage in, support, encourage, or promote: Intolerance, discrimination, or discriminatory practices based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age.” All of which are noble goals and aspirations.

So let’s look at Amazon’s Smile-eligible organizations, some of whom actively campaign to be able to discriminate based on sexual orientation, and that you can select for you Amazon Smile charity:

• National Organization for Marriage
• Traditional Family Coalition
• Focus on the Family

Amazon says that they use the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups to filter out the ineligible, but clearly some organizations did not get filtered out. You can query the list at Amazon and look for your favorite organizations or those whom you think ought not to be there.

So how does Amazon reconcile the disconnect? “These are issues that are complicated, and we’ll continue to look at them,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO.

By: Tengrain

Fully caffeinated with twice the sugar, unabashedly liberal. Award-winning Americans United blogger, blogs at Mock Paper Scissors, and sometimes at Crooks and Liars.

You can follow @Tengrain on Twitter, or you might see him enjoying coffee somewhere in Seattle at any given moment of the day.