How stupid do Nissan and Deborah K. Wooley think gay people are?

Nissan, a board member of the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, just presided over that organization's successful lobbying effort to pass SB632, which would kill Nashville's ordinance protecting its LGBT residents.

Here is the double-talk the company just released about its actions:

We believe that consistent statewide employment standards, rather than a cumbersome array of local laws and ordinances, are essential to maintaining our state’s economic competitiveness. However, HB600/SB632 has become more closely associated with eroding civil liberties than fostering a strong business climate and this we do not support. "

Get it? Nissan doesn't mind the collateral damage to tens of thousands of gay Nashville citizens when the State of Tennessee invalidates a Music City law to ensure "consistency" but it really hates it when you have a bad perception of Nissan because of what it supported as a board member of the Tennessee CoC.

Gee, clever deception must be in Nissan's DNA. Here's what you'll see on Nissan's web site when you attempt to compare the fuel economy of a gas-guzzling Nissan Frontier (made in Smyrna, TN) to that of a similar Ford Ranger. Bear in mind that the Nissan only gets 19/23 MPG while the Ford gets 22/27. Obviously an honest comparison wouldn't be in Nissan's best interest here, so it leverages the fact that Frontiers have bigger tanks (which they obviously need) to mislead shoppers:

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But we digress.

How nasty are the people behind the bill that the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce officially lobbied for on behalf of board members Alcoa, AT&T, Nissan, FedEx, Pfizer, Comcast, DuPont, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Caterpillar, KPMG. Whirlpool, Embraer, and United HealthCare?

Well, here's one of the television ads aired by the so-called "Family Action Council" of Tennessee, implying that protecting gay and transgendered people amounts to sanctioning child molestation.



As if one needed further proof of the banality of the Family Action Council's evil, here is the commercial they changed to black-and-white as it was first broadcast in 2008 by a group peddling similar class hatred in Florida:



The President of the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce and Industry is one Deborah K. Woolley. Why not let her know what you think of her Chamber of Commerce's political alignment with a group which crudely and viciously vilified an entire class of people on television? Do you think she's doing an effective job at showcasing Tennessee as a desirable place to do business? Or is she a crypto-Anita Bryant emblematic of an increasingly nasty state whose products should be boycotted by millions of people?

Deborah K. Woolley
President, Tennessee Chamber of Commerce and Industry