The American Family Association (AFA), which led the charge against the Walt Disney conglomerate over moral values in the mid-1990’s, is ending its Disney boycott. “We feel after nine years of boycotting Disney we have made our point,” AFA President Tim Wildmon said in the ministry’s June 2005 newsletter.
In a May 23 release, Wildmon said boycotts are a “last resort” for the AFA. He said AFA is not shrinking back from the issues it had raised with Disney but is taking the opportunity to address the same issues more broadly “on a crowded cultural battlefield.”
AFA, in launching its Disney boycott in 1996, criticized the entertainment conglomerate for what it described as a decline in moral and family values from the days of founder Walt Disney.
A year earlier, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights had called for a boycott of Disney products, parks and the company’s cable channel over the Disney/Miramax film “Priest.”
The boycott shifted into high gear nationwide when messengers to the 1997 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) adopted a resolution. “On Moral Stewardship and the Disney Company,” in which Southern Baptists were urged to “take the stewardship of their time, money and resources so seriously that they refrain from patronizing The Disney Company and any of its related entites.” The resolution criticized Disney for “increasingly promoting immoral ideologies such as homosexuality, infidelity and adultery.”
Following the SBC resolution, Focus on the Family, the Assemblies of God, Concerned Women for America and other religious groups joined in the boycott.
(BP)
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