Cookie Time

I kid you not...

"I do not like gay cookies": Conservatives vow to boycott Oreo over new ad

Anyway, who wants cookies?

There are plenty to go around...

The Culture Wars in the United States have always been, as far as I'm concerned, an exercise in inanity. Okay, so Mondelēz/Nabisco made a (fairly saccharine) video about supporting family members who are in the process of coming out as homosexual, and in the piece someone eats an Oreo. I don't know that I understand the fuss.

To be sure, while the Culture Wars have, for the most part, been waged from the American Right, this sort of thing is fairly common in American politics more broadly, as the socially reactionary and socially progressive factions of the public demand that corporations only speak out in ways that show support for the "correct" side. Both sides have cultivated an attitude of "if you're not with us, you're against us," and portray themselves as fighting back against the oppression of the overwhelmingly powerful Other. Given that the Right appears to be attempting to turn back the clock to the way things had been for hundreds of years, their claims that they're suddenly an oppressed minority come across as ludicrous on their face, but I'm not really the target audience for such protestations. Likewise, I don't know if the gains that gay people have made are quite as fragile as they're sometimes made out to be.

Either way, it illustrates the primary problem with looking to force organizations, especially profit-focused ones like corporations, into making these sorts of choices. They tend to side with the people who are likely to spend the most money. And not that conservatives don't eat Oreos, but I suspect that Mondelēz makes more money in urban and dense suburban areas than they do out in the sticks. Likewise, with it's headquarters in Chicago, it's a safe bet that most of the company's office employees are drawn from urban areas, and are thus setting the agenda. So it's unlikely that Mr. Shapiro's little crusade will ever amount to much of anything.

It may not have ever been intended to, though. And that's the other thing about the Culture Wars that makes them tiresome to non-combatants like myself. A good portion of it is grandstanding, and nothing more. There's no rational reason to assume that this boycott would catch on well enough to prompt the company to reconsider its stance. So what we're left with is a war of virtue signalling, where the supposed combatants are performing for their supporters, as opposed to trying to actually accomplish something.