Boycott Target!

I'm done with Target. My SO and I must spend a couple of hundred bucks there a month; the store is very near to us, and the prices are damn good. But after I read this, I'm through with that company:

Target earlier this month donated $150,000 to MN Forward, a pro-business group backing Rep. Tom Emmer, the conservative Republican-endorsed gubernatorial candidate.

That led to a week of bruising reaction from Target employees and gay-rights activists that included a nationwide e-mail campaign and petition claiming 15,000 signatures.

On Tuesday, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel defended the donation, saying it was driven by economic, not social, issues.

He highlighted the company's domestic partner benefits, sponsorship of Twin Cities Pride and support of the Out & Equal Workplace Summit.

"Let me be very clear," Steinhafel wrote in a note to employees at headquarters. "Target's support of the GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender] community is unwavering, and inclusiveness remains a core value of our company."

So Target supports a candidate who:

• wants to abolish the minimum wage for waitpersons, believing that "some servers make over $100,00 a year;"
• is anti-gay rights and a rabid homophobe;
• supports Arizona's racist immigration law;
• believes that the courts should go easy on drunk drivers, probably because Emmer himself has two DWIs on his record;
• was co-author "of a proposed state constitutional amendment that would, to borrow the words of Nigel Tufnel, turn the Tenth Amendment all the way up to 11, with Minnesota preemptively nullifying all federal laws unless a state supermajority consents to them;"
•  is just plain stupid;
• and who, just last fall, "proposed another state constitutional amendment that would prohibit any individual or employer mandate to carry health insurance in the state of Minnesota, if one were to eventually pass at the federal or state level (as it did eventually pass at the federal level)."

And oh, yeah: Target CEO Gregg W. Steinhafel personally donated $10,000 to Michelle Bachman's campaign! If that alone isn't reason enough to stop shopping at Target, the donation to MN Forward certainly is.

The Human Rights Campaign and MoveOn.org have both started a boycott against Target (and BestBuy), and I'm with them. I will not have my dollars go towards supporting such far-right, hypocritical, anti-middle-class, homophobic, odious, prejudiced, and just plain stupid candidates as Emmer and Bachman. Bye-bye, Target: too bad you lost your sense of community, fairness, and morality in the urge to increase your profits.

I hope Bullseye bites Steinhafel in the ass.