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AFA JournalCULTUREJC Penney drops Christian business affiliateEight companies sever ties after e-mail campaign by Yahoo! sex club membersAFA Journal, July 2001 Edition Some of the nation’s largest retailers have severed ties with KingdomBuy.com, a Christian online shopping mall, after the retailers were targeted in an E-mail campaign by advocates of online porn. The porn advocates, members of numerous Yahoo! (a popular Internet portal) sex clubs, urged companies affiliated with KingdomBuy to drop the Christian company. KingdomBuy was targeted because of its affiliation with AFA, whose actions recently caused Yahoo! to remove much of the pornography from its Internet servers. (See AFA Journal, 6/01.) The Christian company is called an “online mall” because it acts as an Internet conduit for major retailers who want to increase their sales via the worldwide web. An online shopper can go to www.kingdombuy.com, for example, and purchase products from Wal-Mart, Dell computers, Hickory Farms, and over 200 other companies. Through its “faith-based giving program,” KingdomBuy.com uses a percentage of its profits to support more than 9,000 churches, ministries, Christian schools and missionary organizations. However, five days after the pro-porn E-mail campaign began, two of the nation’s largest retailers, JC Penney and Nordstrom, decided to immediately cancel their association with KingdomBuy. Other companies like Tabasco and Brookstone followed suit. Shasha Richardson, Public Relations Director for Nordstrom, told AFA Journal that the E-mail campaign had nothing to do with that company’s decision to drop KingdomBuy. Richardson said a spot-check of Nordstrom’s more than 5,000 affiliate partner websites discovered that KingdomBuy’s website was religious in nature – a violation of company policy. “Our customers have so many diverse faiths…that, to honor that diversity, as a business we need to apply [our policy] consistently across the board,” she said. Brian Fahling, senior trial attorney for the AFA Center for Law & Policy, said Nordstrom’s reasoning was legal, and even understandable, but still very disturbing. “More and more in our culture, the concept of diversity is being used to isolate Christianity,” he said. “If Nordstrom truly believes in diversity, it should welcome all companies to affiliate with it. For this devotion to diversity to result in exclusion is bizarre.” Sound business principles? JC Penney canceled its relationship with KingdomBuy.com on May 18. However, Jeanine Connolly, public relations manager for JC Penney.com, said she knew nothing about the E-mail campaign by sex club members. When told that May 18 was five days after the E-mail campaign began, she insisted the two were unrelated, saying JC Penney’s decision was based on “sound business grounds.” Gary Sutton, president of KingdomBuy, told AFA Journal that his online mall “made thousands of dollars a month for JC Penney since the partnership began. “Just what were those ‘sound business grounds?’” he asked. “We have contacted JC Penney repeatedly to try to find out why they dropped KingdomBuy, but they’ve never responded to us.” Sutton says he remains committed to helping ministries. “We were giving back a percentage of our income to ministries, but through these difficult circumstances I have made an even greater commitment,” he said. “I have told the Lord that KingdomBuy.com will contribute 100% of its profits to the ministries we support, which include AFA.” |
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