Stop.

[Content Note: Homophobia; Christian Supremacy; class warfare.]

Yesterday, after my garbage governor signed Indiana's "religious freedom" bill into law, the predictable progressive backlash began with an outpouring of blanket generalizations about how people in Indiana are a waste of space (without a trace of irony that such broad statements include queer Hoosiers), admonishments to progressives in red states that we should just move (nope), and a #BoycottIndiana hashtag was started on Twitter. I pushed back, hard, on the suggestions for a boycott.


And those working people include queer business owners, as well as queer employees of inclusive and supportive employers, and also queer employees of shitty and horrible employers, because that's the only job they can get in a state with far too few jobs.

What does this boycott even look like? Are the people advocating a boycott of Indiana going to boycott soy products just in case those soybeans were grown in Indiana? (Haha just kidding. They don't know enough about Indiana to know we grow soybeans here. "One soy latte, please!") No more steel—it might have been forged in Indiana! Better skip the corn on the cob at your Fourth of July barbecue this year; that corn might have been grown in Indiana.

Shit, you'd better stop reading this blog. I was made in Indiana.

(Although my mom is from NYC and my dad is from California, so I have coastal DNA. Decisions decisions!)

If you're a person who criticizes sanctions against foreign nations because you understand that they harm the people of the nation more than the government, but then turn around and advocate boycotting states, you're not a progressive—you're a fauxgressive.

And if you understand that this "religious freedom" bill was a reactionary act by people who were angry that the federal government did something they didn't like (force them to legalize same-sex marriage), then you should understand that a reactionary act by people angry at our state government because they did something you didn't like (codify bigotry) is just part of the same damn problem.

It's not thoughtful and it's not compassionate and it's not helpful.

And let's be honest here: It isn't like the vast majority of people who are cheering "Boycott Indiana!" had any plans to visit Indiana and spend money in this state, anyway. It's just a slogan to shout at a state they perceive to be full of fat, poor, lazy, conservative, straight, cis, white people.

Which underlines what's really the worst thing about this idea: It's reflective of a vicious stereotype that disappears the existence of the very people for whom the sloganeers purport to care.