LETTERS: BOYCOTT IS A PERSONAL DECISION

To the editor:

Concerning the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney, we should consider three points:

1. In recent years, Disney has a deliberate pattern of corporately promoting (to an audience won by wholesome entertainment) homosexuality, heterosexual immorality and anti-Christianity. It owns film and music companies producing gravely obscene material. It now freely admits to injecting penile shapes into "Aladdin"'s cartooning and homosexual lifestyles into "The Lion King." It honors and cultivates perverse lifestyles through corporate policy and at its theme parks. Facts like these are not in dispute, even if we failed to notice.

2. It has always been one task of the people who follow the Judeo-Christian God to call their society away from such things. The Southern Baptist Convention's action is in the finest tradition of the Jewish prophet Jeremiah, the Apostle Paul or St. Thomas More.

3. The boycott is simply an exercise of two inarguable American rights: freedom of speech (asking others not to purchase a certain product) and freedom to buy or not to buy whatever one wants. Greenpeace asks us not to eat tuna. Unions ask us not to buy foreign-made products. People tell their neighbors about rude treatment at a certain merchant. How are the Southern Baptists different?

By the way, the Baptists are accused of "stuffing" their morality down our throats. No one stuffs anything down your throat when asking you not to buy something. Go ahead and buy what you want. Throat stuffing might better apply to an entertainment company that subtly propagandizes a childhood audience with the slanderously inaccurate historical drivel of "Pocahontas." Or to the charming and compelling manner in which "The Little Mermaid" rebelliously goes against her parents' training to do whatever she wants. Or to the hilarious prime-time television lynching of ageless moral standards in favor of lesbianism, of multiple sex partners by popular characters and of goofy, irrelevant Christians.

Could it be that many of us do indeed know that Disney is merrily butchering our moral fiber, but it is too much to ask us to skip our trip to Orlando, to pass up "101 Dalmatians" or to turn off ABC in the evening? The alluring prostitute described in Proverbs 7 is too, too attractive.

When I pass up "Hercules," I'm not trying to make a statement. I'm just trying to keep my few entertainment dollars out of the hands of these people. May I respectfully ask that you consider the same?

Boycott Disney.

MIKE WOELK

Cape Girardeau