US: Struggling anti-gay NOM launches boycott against JPMorgan Chase
The anti-gay National Organization for Marriage is urging supporters to boycott international mega-bank JPMorgan Chase, following claims that the bank asked employees if they were “an ally of the LGBT community”.
Jeremy Hooper of Good As You, who reported on the campaign shortly before its launch, described the boycott as part of a “fake, wholly concocted, and truly absurd ‘scandal’”. He added: “Chase should swat away this NOM effort like the politically-driven parasite that it is. And laugh heartily while doing it.”
In a blog post last month, NOM co-founder Robert George reproduced a claim that a non-anonymous internal survey had asked whether employees were members or allies of the LGBT community.
Following suggestions that the information might be used to create a “‘you can fire these people first’ list”, he commented: “The message to all employees is perfectly clear: You are expected to fall into line with the approved and required thinking. Nothing short of assent is acceptable. Silent dissent will no longer be permitted.”
NOM has now launched a website entitled ‘VoidChase’, and a petition, which currently has over 2,800 signatures, calling on the Board of Directors of JP Morgan Chase to apologise.
Brian Brown, NOM president, said in a press release: “Chase was clearly pushing an LGBT agenda with these invasive survey questions, and also created an intimidating and threatening atmosphere for their employees who wondered what the ‘right’ answers were and how ‘wrong’ answers would be dealt with.”
He claimed: “Asking employees whether they’re allies of the gay community is a highly inappropriate question in the first place, but it is particularly offensive when the answer can be tied directly to individual employees, as is the case when someone must enter their Employee ID number to ‘log in’ to complete the survey.”
NOM has previously initiated boycotts against Starbucks and Mozilla. Neither produced any noticeable impact on the companies.
Although 2014 has seen failures for opponents to same-sex marriage across the U.S., NOM has seen a particular raft of failures, both financially and in the courts.
