I don’t think anyone has asked yet who might take our place in Phoenix if we do decide to boycott. Just for the sake of argument, what if the Tea Party or some nativist organization took our spot and showed up with 4,000 conventioneers, 500 of whom turned out for a demonstration at the state capitol in favor of SB 1070 on a hot weekday afternoon?
Not that we have any control over who takes our place, but will the boycott have been worth it if something awful like this happened in our absence? The thing about unintended consequences is they don’t care if your heart was in the right place.
I say all this not to put a boogey man in the room but to point out that there will be a cost to our not being in Phoenix advocating in person for our values. Even if we’re replaced by some harmless trade show, their conventioneers won’t be out demonstrating against SB 1070. We know part of the cost of our absence now, but a lot of the cost we won’t know until well after the fact.
Even if only a small fraction of GA attendees show up for a demonstration—which is the norm, as many have gone to pains to point out—it’s still better than nobody showing up to demonstrate. It’s not the only cost to account for, but it should be added into the mix with all the others.
I am a UU in South Carolina. The NAACP is conducting an ongoing boycott of my state because the state government will not remove the Confederate battle flag from a prominent position on the state house grounds. My UU congregation has been active in the protests against the flag.
It is difficult to see what effect the boycott is having, if any. Our convention centers, sports, and concert venues seem to track regional trends. Really, the only beneficial effect I see is that when the boycott stays in the news, the flag issue stays in the news. The unacceptable compromise on the Confederate battle flag was struck in 2001, and the boycott has been ongoing since then. The state leaders seem to consider it a non-issue and they do not pursue it. Yet the NAACP boycott is still keeping it in the news (http://www.live5news.com/Global/story.asp?S=12045629).
If the Arizona immigration law is still on the books in 2012, it may be a good idea to have the boycott, simply to keep the issue in the forefront, even though the monetary impact of withholding our dollars from the state is likely to be minimal or zero.
Your story underscores how high a barrier a Phoenix boycott would have to surmount in order to be effective. I wouldn’t be surprised if the politicos who kept the Confederate flag on the SC flag see the NAACP boycott as a fringe benefit to their policy and get a good chuckle anytime they see it in the news.
So, what do you think of the compromise they reached at GA? Are you going to be there?
I was at GA briefly for district business, but wasn’t around for the plenaries. The compromise seems to gone over pretty well, or at least I haven’t heard any blowback.