In a move described only as a business decision, Enterprise Rent-A-Car yesterday dropped its affiliation with Christian shopping mall KingdomBuy.com.
Enterprise is the latest in a string of national retailers to abandon the faith-based organization. KingdomBuy has about 200 retail affiliates that give the website a percentage of purchases made through the website’s portal. KingdomBuy.com donates its cut to the Christian organization of each shopper’s choice. Retailers including Nordstrom and J.C. Penney began dropping KingdomBuy just days after an organized e-mail campaign began against the web mall.
Yesterday, KingdomBuy’s director Gary Sutton received an e-mail from Enterprise, explaining the reason for the rental-car company’s decision:
“Your site promotes negative and exclusionary ideas and beliefs toward particular group(s). Enterprise Rent-A-Car does not wish to associate itself with your site or organization. Please remove all Enterprise Rent-A-Car links, references, and the like from your site immediately.”
The e-mail was sent by Travis Wools of Enterprise’s Interactive Promotions department. Wools told WorldNetDaily the e-mail was sent by mistake. Enterprise has many affiliates, and the e-mail was intended for another organization, he said. Nevertheless, the company is severing ties with KingdomBuy for “business reasons.” Wools would not elaborate, except to say the company periodically reviews its affiliates. If one is not performing well financially for Enterprise, it is cut. KingdomBuy fit into that category, he said.
Asked if Enterprise had received any e-mails protesting its affiliation with KingdomBuy, Wools would not comment. Interestingly, according to Sutton, Wools admitted in a phone call that Enterprise was concerned about KingdomBuy’s affiliation with AbidingTruth.com – a group that opposes the cultural “normalization” of the homosexual lifestyle.
“The e-mail was not sent by mistake,” remarked Sutton. “When I had Mr. Wools on the phone, he stated that he was reading an e-mail complaint from a customer. He indicated the customer was complaining that our website was affiliated with AbidingTruth.com, which Mr. Wools claims is an anti-gay site. The truth of the matter is Abiding Truth is not affiliated with KingdomBuy.com. AbidingTruth has registered at our website to receive support, but has not yet received any money from KingdomBuy.com.
“Using Mr. Wools’ definition of anti-gay would mean that most Christian organizations are anti-gay, since most believe that the homosexual lifestyle is a violation of Biblical guidelines for human behavior,” he added.
Sutton invited visitors to see his website for themselves to determine if it is “anti-gay,” saying there is nothing remotely resembling such content.
“We support all Christian organizations. It sounds like to me that Mr. Wools does not want to be involved with us because we support Christian organizations that potentially don’t agree with the gay lifestyle,” he continued. “We are incredibly straightforward. KingdomBuy.com is simply a website where people can shop and lend tremendous support to feed starving children, support their local church or any multitude of good works done by Christian organizations throughout the world.”
About 9,000 groups receive money through KingdomBuy’s program, including the American Family Association – a non-profit, traditional-values organization based in Tupelo, Miss. Members of Yahoo.com’s “Don’t close adult clubs” online club got wind of AFA’s affiliation with KingdomBuy and began an e-mail campaign against retail outlets associated with the program. Within days, retailers began to drop the affiliate, though they deny their similarly timed decisions were based on any e-mail campaign.
The 11,500-member “Don’t close adult clubs” club was formed after Yahoo announced it would begin phasing out its pornographic store items. The phase-out began in part due to AFA’s correspondence with Yahoo, insisting the pornographic items be removed. As a result, visitors to Yahoo founded the club. The club’s e-mail campaign was designed to cut funding to AFA by reducing the number of KingdomBuy’s retail affiliates. But Sutton said AFA receives less than 1 percent of his group’s total contributions.
Some KingdomBuy affiliates that initially dropped from the program have returned, such as Avon, FTD.com and Walmart.com. Others maintain their position despite complaints from consumers. Nordstrom said it has a “policy about not affiliating with websites that contain religious or political content,” wrote Nordstrom spokeswoman Shasa Richardson.
In an e-mail response to a complaint about the mega-retailer’s discontinued affiliation with KingdomBuy, Richardson wrote, “These have been our giving guidelines for a number of years – about a decade. We owned the Seattle Seahawks football team in the ’70’s. When they would lose a game, people would send in their Nordstrom credit cards cut up. At that time, we began re-evaluating our advertising, sponsorship and advertising policies.”
“We have always worked hard to ensure that we do not offend any group by supporting another. We know that by supporting one religion or one side of a political issue we could be upsetting some customers. Our experience has taught us that when we have made exceptions, we always disappoint someone,” Richardson continued. “We’re in business to sell merchandise and take care of our customers – not to disappoint them!”
Since the controversy began, KingdomBuy has added several Christian businesses to the list of retailers. Sutton remains perplexed by the sudden attention his organization has received.
“I am at a loss to understand all of this,” he said. “The only thing I can think of is that maybe, just maybe, there might be some anti-Christian sentiment out there.”
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