Article: Boycott Arizona Republicans - not Arizona

As boycott fever grows, so does the blindness that characterizes it. When I first joined a group that was planning a boycott of the AZ Major League baseball team, the Diamondbacks, whose owner happens to be a supporter of the AZ pols who enacted the now infamous immigration legislation, I didn't immediately see the poetic justice of this approach. You see, I didn't know that Ken Kendricks, Diamondbacks' owner, was a major campaign contributor of many of the Republican public servants who are now attacking the civil rights and human dignity of a substantial number of their constituents. I was also not thinking about the damage that would be befall some of the very people I wanted to support and defend were we to seek a broader boycott of the entire state of Arizona. But then some of my efforts started drawing responses to enlighten me to all of these aspects of what we were doing. What sort of responses?

First of all, we wanted to increase the visibility of the Diamondbacks Boycott, so we designed some tshirts with a patriotic map of the US containing an outline of AZ with a big BOYCOTT graphic across it's face. We then started looking for Phoenix residents to wear tshirts such as this at a rally during the next Diamondbacks' home game on May 7. Well, we were made aware quickly by some of our Boycott partners that a general boycott of Arizona would not be favorably received by the members of the organizations these partners represented. At the same time, I was corresponding with the leaders of several Democratic organizations in the state who advised me that the best solution to problems created by the ill-conceived immigration legislation was not to boycott the whole state, perpetrators and victims alike, but rather, to elect a strong Democratic leadership to replace the conservatives who passed this legislation. In other words, it would be better to boycott AZ Republicans than to boycott the entire state of Arizona.