Having failed to force Ford Motor company to discriminate against homosexual people via threats of a boycott, the religious right will next attempt to force it to discriminate via shareholder vote…

(Washington) Ford Motor Company shareholders will vote next month on a resolution to drop protections for LGBT workers from the company’s human resources regulations.

The company had fought the motion, submitted by shareholder Robert Hurley of Alton, Ill, but when Alton took the issue to the  U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission the commission said the automaker must put the resolution to a vote at Ford’s annual meeting May 11.

The motion calls for Ford to change its policy to exclude any reference to sexual interests, activities or orientation.

Fine.  Let’s see how the shareholders feel about their gay and lesbian neighbors.  Every time we buy a Ford product, which now includes Volvo, that’s money into their pockets too after all, in one way or another.  It isn’t just the executive salaries we’re helping to pay.

Pitching wares to the gay community while discriminating against glbt employees is nothing new in the auto world of course.  BMW seems more then willing to try it , and they don’t even have the excuse of being located in a nation that religious fundamentalists are holding by the balls…

Our goal is not to incite a boycott of BMW’s cars, but rather to arm you, our readers, with awareness of the company’s actions as well as of those of the media outlets that published the ad. Speaking of which, one would hope that the publishers of GLBT-owned magazines and web sites would have higher standards than to accept advertising from a major, multinational corporation whose policies discriminate against the very audience that those publications were created to serve. Advertising dollars are scarce these days, but there is plenty of business from other car companies to go after—Gaywheels.com lists no less than 30 brands that qualify as gay-friendly.

But what really makes you angry about Robert Hurley’s cheapshit attempt to put a knife in the back of loyal Ford Motor Company employees, is that Ford management wants to be part of the civilized world, was willing to stand up to bigotry in a way that it’s founder, who admired Adolf Hitler, could never have fathomed.  And like an infection the homophobic bigots keep trying to drag it down into their gutter. 

You’d have thought that by now the United States of America would at least be past the point about arguing whether or not gay and lesbian people should even be allowed something as basic as the ability to hold down a job.  But you’d be wrong.  Never mind same sex marriage…it’s the twenty-first century and we’re still arguing about evolution, let alone about the humanity of women, people of color, and homosexuals.  There’s an old joke about how Australia got all of England’s criminals, and America got all its religious fanatics, and between the two countries we got the shit end of the stick.