Much as it pains me to do so, I must eat a little crow here. (The store was all out of turkey.) In the past, for reasons that I felt were amply justified, I had nothing but criticism for Wal-Mart. I termed them “the retailer everyone loves to hate� and decried them for their “bull-headed and bullying� ways. As it turns out, though, the company may not be entirely despicable (he says, damning them with faint praise). They may actually have a tolerant bone in their corporate body, even a genuine willingness to embrace diversity and oppose discrimination. Such faint but welcome signs of humanity are laudable. At least, one would think so:

Conservative plan to protest Wal-Mart

NEW YORK (AP) — Long under fire from the left, Wal-Mart is now a target of Christian conservatives urging shoppers to boycott the huge retailer’s post-Thanksgiving sales because of its low-key outreach to some gay-rights organizations.

One group, the American Family Association, is asking supporters to stay away from Wal-Mart on Friday and Saturday—two of the busiest shopping days of the year. Another group, Operation Save America, plans prayer-and-preaching rallies outside many Wal-Mart stores on Friday.

The corporate actions that triggered the protests were little different from those taken by scores of major companies in recent years—Wal-Mart paid $25,000 this summer to become a member of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and donated $60,000 to Out and Equal, which promotes gay-rights advances in the workplace.

Conservative leaders viewed these actions as a betrayal of Wal-Mart’s traditions, which have included efforts to weed out magazines with racy covers and CDs with explicit lyrics.

“This has been Christian families’ favorite store—and now they’re giving in, sliding down the slippery slope so many other corporations have gone down,� said the Rev. Flip Benham of Operation Save America. “They’re all being extorted by the radical homosexual agenda.� [full text]

Gee, I hardly know what to mock first, the notion that “radical homosexuals� are having their way with Wal-Mart or the fact that a Reverend named Flip is hawking such poppycock. While I’d like to believe that the good Reverend was just being flippant, I know better. Sadly, when Flip asserts that “every executive at Wal-Mart that allowed this to happen needs a good old fashioned spanking,� he means it. He says it with a straight face (which is a tad ironic, given that he apparently aches to administer some man-on-man discipline).

To be honest, it eludes me what the flap is all about. It’s not as though the Wal-Mart smiley face was caught doing meth with a gay hooker in the toiletries aisle. Flip and his conservative cohorts are making a mountin’ out of a molehill. Wal-Mart made $83.5 billion in net sales in the last fiscal quarter alone! The $85,000 that Wal-Mart contributed to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and Out and Equal is roughly one ten-thousandth of one percent of one quarter’s net sales. It’s barely a drop in the bucket.

But I guess that’s one drop too many for those with a radical conservative agenda, who seemingly long for the halcyon days of unabashed gay bashing. Kudos to Wal-Mart for taking a modest step in the opposite direction from these wretched souls, who are clearly Christian in name only.