Anybody up for boycotting Barilla Pasta?

How the Barilla campaign is helping fight homophobia in Italy
9/30/2013
by John Aravosis

...I’ve been working in gay civil rights advocacy at the national (and international) level for twenty years now. And there’s always someone who’s utterly convinced that A) any particular campaign we’re working on is silly, and B) our tactics are dumb.

The most recent example was with the Russian vodka boycott that, I’d argue, was primarily responsible for exploding internationally the story of Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on gay and trans people in Russia (a story that was nowhere on the radar for two years, and now is everywhere). The naysayers were convinced the boycott was a dumb idea that wouldn’t accomplish our goals, until of course it did.

And the same thing is now happening with Barilla.

A lot of people, most people in fact, don’t really understand politics or political activism. And it’s only natural that they don’t. Every vocation carries with it a certain expertise, and not everyone can be good at everything. Boy did I learned that lesson the summer I tried to wait tables between my undergrad and law school. I was a disaster at it. I had never before so appreciated how difficult it is, or the particular skills you must have (memory and multi-tasking come to mind), to be an effective server in a restaurant. I certainly know it now.

And the same thing goes for advocacy. It takes a particular skillset to be able to pick the right issue, and craft the right campaign, in order to achieve a particular, well-chosen, political goal. The skillset involves a lot of PR and marketing savvy, for starters, but it’s also about knowing how to fight: about knowing how, and how much, to beat the cr*p out of someone, or some company, in order to achieve a particular goal.

If you do advocacy the right way, it’s a lot more complicated than it appears on its face. Like anything done well, it should appear simple on its face. But if it’s done right, it’s really not.

Take the Russian vodka boycott. To the naysayers, the boycott was about economically hurting Stolichnaya vodka, which they said we couldn’t accomplish, nor would it matter. To those of us behind the boycott (Dan Savage announced it, Queer Nation took it and ran with it), the goal of the boycott had little to do with Stolichnaya. Stoli was simply a foil (a well-deserving foil, I might add, since they are a Russian vodka, and up until our protest didn’t even have an LGBT non-discrimination policy, let alone partner benefits). They were a means to an end that had nothing to do with hurting Stoli financially. The goal was to use Stolichnaya’s rather famous Russian-name as a means of catapulting the oppression of Russian gays in to the public consciousness – of using Stoli as a PR hook for the media and the public at large. And it worked.

Which takes us back to Barilla. If you think this campaign is about spaghetti (or that Chick-fil-A was about chicken), then you don’t know a lot about politics or effective political advocacy. Corporations are central to our civil rights battle. Sometimes because they take the lead in promoting our civil rights and setting an example for others (most people don’t realize that as “evil” as companies can sometimes be, they’ve often have led the way on gay civil rights – Microsoft and Apple come to mind). But sometimes even bad business are helpful, as mentioned above, because they provide a perfect foil for fixing a specific problem in that company, and sending a larger message to corporations, and all people, around the world.

Take Barilla. There were multiple things going on in my head when I first heard about what their chairman said:

1. They’re a huge international company with big brand name appeal. People will know them, and be ticked when they hear what the chairman did. That means this story has the potential to get big, fast. Thus, it’s a good story from a PR perspective.

2. The chairman was talking about not wanting to put gays – gay families, specifically – in his advertising. This is an ongoing problem for our community, visibility (though it’s improved over the years). Having gay families appear in TV commercials helps to establish that we are a normal part of the American, Italian, and every other “family.” And that message is priceless in terms of advancing our civil and human rights.

3. If we make a lesson out of Barilla, the ripple effect on other companies, in terms of biting their anti-gay tongue, but more importantly, their understanding that the gay, and gay-friendly, market is now huge and powerful, and the haters, not so much.

4. We had a chance to help the LGBT community in Italy. What an interesting twist on globalization to potentially use the fact that a homophobic Italian company is so vested in foreign markets that it now much curtail its home-grown bigotry in order to survive globally.

That last point was laid out far more beautifully than I by Lorenza Antonucci in Slate. Antonucci explains how homophobia and hate speech are regular occurrences in official public Italian life – she calls it a “system of legitimized public homophobia.” And the international response to Barilla emboldened Italian civil rights advocates in a way that’s rarely happened before.

A good, smart civil rights campaign is about far more than pasta or vodka or chicken sandwiches.

It’s about changing the culture, and pushing the entire world in the direction of more freedom and more tolerance.

That’s not to say that every advocacy campaign, or boycott, is well thought out or wise. They’re often not, and this is why I’m so critical of sites like Change.org. Taking 15 seconds to pen a petition is not “change.” If anything, it undercuts true, effective advocacy by creating a lot of white noise, and a lot of useless “action” that empowers people to smugly do nothing of value.

But that’s a post for another day. What I wanted to do today was highlight Antonucci’s column, and give you a sense of how important all of our work is, in ways that sometimes we don’t even fully comprehend. In a real way, we all helped advance the cause of civil rights in Italy last week, potentially helping millions of people become slightly more free. And that’s gotta count for something.

http://americablog.com/2013/09/barilla-campaign-helping-fight-homophobia-italy.html

So what? This doesn't involve either of us except that you're boycotting Barillo and I intend to buy it. I believe in free speech but apparently you only do when you agree with it.

I couldn't care less about rights movements or political agendas of any kind. I'm not a crusader...

I am rarely wrong.

Quote:

I am rarely able to admit I'm wrong.

(I fixed it for him)

You give Whackeye credit for an intelligence he has never displayed
in these fora. There is nothing in what he posted to authorize such an interpretation.

Insolence?

You suggest that it is impertinent to tell you you are wrong?

I call that monumental conceit.
According to Whackeye the foundation of these putative rights
(a good term, given how vague his claim is) is to be in the disapproval
of what he is pleased to call the "collective."

There is nothing n what he wrote which authorizes a claim
about action by the government.

LOL only five vote downs for telling the truth concerning the history of the gay rights movement?

Amazing..............

http://www.mindofmodernity.com/not-sick-the-1973-removal-of-homosexuality-from-the-dsm

The report is given by Alix Spiegel, whose grandfather, Dr. John P. Spiegel, was president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 when this historic change took place. Alix describes the family myth – that grandpa had single-handedly changed the APA’s position on homosexuality and removed one of the major barriers to equal rights for homosexuals in America. The truth, she says, is actually much more complicated. Though he did play a role in this historic change, ‘grandpa’ was not the driving force his family believed him to be, nor were his motives simply those of dedicated psychiatrist and champion of human rights. In Alix Spiegel’s words:
… this version of events was discarded anyway. Discarded after the family went on vacation to the Bahamas to celebrate my grandfather’s 70th birthday. I remember it well. I also remember my grandfather stepping out from his beach front bungalow on that first day followed by a small well-built man, a man that later during dinner my grandfather introduced to a shocked family as his lover, David. David was the first of a long line of very young men that my grandfather took up with after my grandmother’s death. It turned out that my grandfather had had gay lovers throughout his life, had even told his wife-to-be that he was homosexual, two weeks before their wedding. And so in 1981 the story that my family told about the definition in the DSM changed dramatically.