“While I firmly believe that a business climate conducive to growth is critical to our future, I realize our decision affected many of you in a way I did not anticipate, and for that I am genuinely sorry,” Steinhafel wrote.
He added, “The diversity of our team is an important aspect of our unique culture and our success as a company, and we did not mean to disappoint you, our team or our valued guests.”
Gay rights activists and loyal Target shoppers were furious with the company after it contributed $150,000 to MN Forward , a political group that has endorsed and is paying for ads for the Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer.
Emmer, who will face the winner of the Democratic gubernatorial primary and an independent candidate in the general election this November.
I’m gonna skip over Emmer’s endorsement of a Christian rock band that basically called for gay people to be executed because this quote has already gotten kind of long, but there’s one other bit that jumped out at me here,
Large corporations have only recently been legally allowed to contribute to campaign advertising, after the Supreme Court in January reversed a century of campaign finance reform that had limited the money that could be spent by private companies and unions.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like Citizens United and the floodgates of campaign and general politicking cash that it dumped on all of us and the way it basically forced corporations into these donations as a way to maintain the kind of political access their competitors get (no corp wants to be the only one not donating when they need a favor) really explains so much of the political and cultural insanity we’ve seen since 2010