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Editorial: Illinois Lt Governor Using her Office for Personal Vendetta
Posted by spatula on Jun. 21, 2001
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Corinne Wood, the Lieutenant Governor of Illinois is using her office and taxpayer money to play out a personal vendetta against Abercrombie and Fitch...

Yeah, the same tired crap we hear time and time again about everything from condom ads to music videos to newspaper articles to school textbooks. And every time, the outrage is the same and the battle cry is that the offending object must be eradicated from space-time and then some.

Outraged at MTV. Outraged at HBO. Outraged at PBS. Outraged at the Associated Press. Outraged at evolution. Outraged... at Abercrombie and Fitch?

Corinne Wood, Lieutenant Governor of Illinois is outraged at Abercrombie and Fitch. She's outraged because their catalogs are sexually explicit. It's true-- they are sexually explicit (and their models are totally hot!)-- this is well known, and the reason A&F requires age verification to purchase their quarterly catalog and the reason their catalog has a sticker on it stating that it is for adults only. Further, to our knowledge, A&F does not send out catalogs unsolicited.

But that isn't good enough for Corinne, because she's outraged. She's calling for a boycott of A&F, accusing the company of continuing a "deeply offensive and blatantly sexual marketing campaign aimed at our children," although she doesn't explain how she determined that A&F marketing is directed at children (A&F says they target the 18-22 market). She makes further accusations (without anything to back them up of course):

This is not a marketing campaign aimed at adults. I am disgusted by the sexual images Abercrombie & Fitch is using to sell its clothing line to a young, impressionable preteen and teenage audience. This company has a shameful track record of exploiting children to push its products. As a concerned parent and elected official, I feel parents should be made aware of how this company is recklessly targeting our youth.

References to children: 6. References to parents: 3. Pretty standard. For the children! Because I'm a parent! Again, notice how Wood makes a number of accusations without a single word to back them up. How is A&F aiming their campaign at kids, who quite frankly don't stand a chance of affording A&F clothes on their allowance money? What are some examples of their "track record" and how have they "exploited children" exactly? What's different about A&F marketing products that constitutes "pushing" them? The way she talks, you'd think this was a speech about the war on drugs.

Wood goes so far as to call the catalogs "obscene," showing her ignorance of the legal definition of what constitutes obscenity. We'll run it by everyone again just for completeness:

(1) The average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (2) the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The A&F catalogs don't even come close to satisfying this definition.

But what's even more stupid and more treacherous than Wood's holy war against the evil A&F catalog is the way she's promoting it. It would be one thing if she were just using her personal time to run a web site (and in part, she is, with stopAandF.com), but she's going further than that. She's got press releases on her state-operated Lieutenant Governor's web site, which by itself isn't that bad (politicians spout off brainlessly in press releases all the time).

She has another page on her Lieutenant Governor site titled, "Join Lieutenant Governor Corinne Wood in her boycott against Abercrombie & Fitch" followed by a heartwarming diatribe about how she found a catalog in her daughter's room and blah blah blah.

That's right, folks. Corinne Wood is using taxpayer money to support her smear campaign against Abercrombie and Fitch. She is using her title to sound important and using the resources of a state-operated web site to draw attention to her personal vendetta site; It's got a huge stop-sign graphic linking it to her official state page.

How is that ethical? We're outraged!

---Nick

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