It wasn't until I was on my Twitter feed today that I'd noticed Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) had changed his avatar to behold his latest - and might I say very misguided - crusade, one called #DmupStoli.
Searching that hashtag, I came upon his original blog posting, which explained his rationale.
And I disagree with most of it, because the nature of it is simply, at least with the Stoli part of the crusade, that all bars and people should drop it purely on that because Stoli is Russian one should drop it.
WTF? I mean, the #DumpSochi part, I can understand. Russia, having agreed to be internationally welcoming by virtue of agreeing to host another Olympics has made an implicit communication with the world that it would accept all people in the spirit of harmony and international union. Recently legalizing effective discrimination against any amount of people, GLBT members included, goes against that spirit.
Going against any number of private companies just because they come from a country which decided to enact certain legislation makes about as much sense in my eyes as Boston as a whole effectively refusing to allow Tamerlan Tsarnaev a burial within Massachusetts. That was another bit of ire at the backhanded twofaceness the United States can have.
Imagine if there were somewhere in the United States that still refused to bury someone in a specific place just because that person were, say, Jewish, Black, or Japanese? That was what happened to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and what's now happening because Stolichnaya happens to be a Russian company. Not a Russian government company. A Russian company.
Don't refuse something based on its proximity to something "society" seems to dislike or that someone says shouldn't be.
I say one questions separately Russia the country and Tamerlan Tsarnaev's actions as what are reprehensible, and treat Russian vodka the private, unaffiliated company product and Tamerlan Tsarnaev the human being as private, unaffiliated company products undeserving of prosecution and a human being deserving a proper burial like any human being should.
I've thus decided - not that he would give two shits because he's so high on himself and his ego that he doesn't care what a person thinks anyway - to unsubscribe to Dan Savage's podcast. His decision to discriminate against a series of products just because they happen to be of a country - and not for a country - that discriminates is as unjust and backward as the people who thought Jewish people, Black people, and Japanese people were not human beings and thus exploitable and worthy of abuse.
I say #DropDanSavage, if that's how he's going to be.
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