McDonald's boycott has social movement potential

People are finally starting to boycott McDonald's - but not for a good reason.

The newly-established McDonald's boycott isn't because it treats its employees poorly or because it serves food that rots you from the inside. No, those things actually make sense and would be great reasons to boycott McDonald's. We're dealing with a different type of boycott here. A select group of folks based in our neighboring state of Mississippi have chosen to boycott McDonald's because the chain "supports the gay agenda."

I know it's easy to just brush this off as another example of the religious right freaking out about something, but this little social movement is actually pretty interesting and may function as a litmus test for future American social movements.

This whole issue started in early 2008 when Richard Ellis, vice president of communications for McDonald's USA, took a seat on the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce board of directors.

The NGLCC is a non-profit organization that encourages and helps develop businesses owned by members of the LGBT community. While it is not an official government agency, though its name implies such, it does act as a middle man between gay and lesbian business owners and their local chamber of commerce.

It's pretty easy to see where this is going.

The American Family Association, a religious group based in Mississippi, took issue with this business deal because its members believe the McDonald's corporation is supporting the gay agenda.

The AFA, also a non-profit organization, is concerned with the preservation of the American family, so the rusty and broken-down chain of logic is obvious - homosexuals are bad people; McDonald's has someone on the board of an organization that helps homosexuals; thus McDonald's is also populated with bad people. Not because it makes bad food, but because it supports gay people.

The AFA has called for a national boycott of all McDonald's restaurants because, as posted in an article on its internally run Onenewsnow.com site, "The AFA took issue with McDonald's refusal to remain neutral in the culture war."

Currently the AFA is telling its members to boycott eating at McDonald's restaurants and to call their local franchises to inform the management staff of McDonald's secret plot to help out the gay community.

This isn't the first time the AFA has called for a boycott of a national corporation that supposedly supported the gay agenda. In 2006 the group called for a similar boycott of Wal-Mart that was scheduled to take place over the post-Thanksgiving shopping weekend.

When threatened with the loss of sales on Black Friday, Wal-Mart backed down and issued a statement confirming its neutrality on gay marriage. The AFA subsequently canceled the boycott.

They haven't canceled this one yet.

Through a letter sent to the AFA, McDonald's confirmed its commitment to diversity and has refused to back down.

It's crunch time for the AFA. Can they make the mighty McDonald's bow down?

Sure there are some faulty causal mechanisms at work here, and I'm honestly not sure who is putting together this so-called gay agenda, but this group has serious potential as a mechanism for social change.

In a column this past spring I wrote about the potential power of conservative Christians as a voting block. While my focus was on the political power of conservative Protestants, it's not the only possible outcome - this boycott could serve as a field test for the modern social power of religion.

Here in the U.S., that translates into the social power of conservative Christians.

By their sheer numbers conservative Christians represent a large portion of the U.S. population. According to the 2007 Pew National Trusts Survey on Religious Life, more than one quarter of U.S. citizens self-identify as evangelical Protestant - the group of denominations most commonly associated with conservative Christianity.

Conservative Christians are more than just evangelical Protestants and may self-identify with any denomination. However, they do frequently share beliefs on hot-button issues.

A unified belief on an issue can certainly serve as the glue for a social movement. In this circumstance the culture war against the gay agenda serves as a very strong bonding element. When combined with a large potential audience, you have the makings of an old-school social movement.

Their opponent, however, is a grease-spewing juggernaut that will be fairly difficult to topple.

That doesn't mean they can't have an effect though. After only a few weeks of threats the AFA got Wal-Mart, also a large and powerful corporation, to back down and claim neutrality - so there is precedent and potential.

Whether that potential will open us up to a new era of activism or condemn us to an oppressive theocracy is still up in the air.