I’m not happy about or proud of this fact, but it’s simply a law of nature that once females get pregnant or rear children, they will be drawn to those giant red cement balls like a moth to a flame. So asking a mom to boycott Target is like asking a squirrel to boycott all pecan trees or asking a heroin addict to boycott all street corners — a seemingly insurmountable task that goes against our nature.
Where else can you, in one single trip to the store, pick up that Joanna Gaines wallpaper for your husband to install this weekend, that one scented body wash that only Target carries, a few things to make dinner, and a new cheap pair of shoes for your 4-year-old to wear to soccer practice tonight because they somehow outgrew theirs overnight? Quite literally, nowhere except Target.
But if we’ve learned anything over the last three years, throughout the course of Covid lockdowns and school board curriculum battles, if there is one demographic willing to take on the most seemingly insurmountable institutions who prey on children, it’s moms.
Target has been in the corporate LGBT Pride game for years, so their slide further down the post-Obergerfell slippery slope this year is not at all surprising. But this year, they finally pushed conservatives who looked past their massive Pride Month displays for years to the edge when they produced merchandise like children’s “tuck-friendly” and “chest binding” bathing suits and Pride-themed clothing for children and even infants. They are also selling graphic tees designed by a Satan supporter who called for the eradication of anyone who disagrees with the mutilation of children.
Conservatives are pushing back, and it’s working. In recent days, Target began pulling their Pride and “Satanic” merchandise from both stores and online. Their corporate headquarters reportedly held an “emergency meeting” to avoid a “Bud Light” situation. No matter what story about “violent confrontations” Target publicists come up with to deny that the pushback is working, it is indeed working. But we can’t let up, and suburban moms — the most important Target customers — must be on the front lines.
Boycotts can feel like a drop in the bucket, like you’re hardly making a difference, but they do work. And we know this because we just witnessed a very successful cratering of Anheuser-Busch’s stock price and a decline in sales across all their brands, not just Bud Light’s. It worked because strong, unabashed men proudly stopped buying Bud Light and shamed anyone who did after the beer company partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Dudes crushed Bud Light — now it’s time for the ladies to do their part.
If anyone is going make a difference in Target’s sales, it’s the women who they so heavily target with everything from their cute but affordable clothing lines and Instagram-influencer-driven home goods lines. Sure, dudes can abstain from buying their candles at Target too, but we need buy-in from their key demographic to make a difference, no matter how much it may inconvenience us. As Megan Basham so perfectly said, your children “need a future free from corporate-backed insanity way more than they need another outfit from Cat and Jack.”
Maybe you can’t commit to a forever boycott, and that’s understandable, but at least for the month of June, we must send a message about Pride Month to Target and their corporate peers about what happens when they bring Pride parades into our grocery shopping and push Satanic and sexual fetishes onto our children.
