Two days after Apple removed Exodus International’s rule-breaking antigay app from its online retail store, the app is — for thousands of people who downloaded it — alive and well.
See that picture to the right? It’s the app running on my iPad right now.
The app is still slow — so slow, in fact, that Apple’s quality-review team should have rejected it for that reason alone.
And the app still supplies its unhealthy dose of antigay and antifamily venom.
The only thing missing now is Apple’s stamp of retail approval.
Yet across the Internet, people who have not even seen the app — nor taken one moment to review the antifamily, antifaith, and antiscience advice on Exodus’ web site — are leaping at the opportunity to defend a special right among Christian Rightists to force Apple to violate its guidelines and carry apps that undermine mental health, family integrity, religious freedom, and respect for minority groups.
If Exodus really possessed a special right to force its views upon retailers’ shelves, then there would be little to stop Exodus from marching into mall-based Apple Stores and installing un-erasable NARTH e-books and Exodus website bookmarks on the desktop of every Mac Pro, iMac and iPad, right below that shiny “Macintosh HD” icon.
If “free speech” means that Exodus can tell retailers what to market, then little is stopping Exodus from marching into every Best Buy and putting its icons and e-books on every Dell, HP, and Toshiba computer, every Amazon Kindle and every Barnes & Noble Nook.
So long as Exodus tries to force retailers to hawk its merchandise, Exodus should be consistent in its logic — by allowing gay activists the same right to force Exodus’ website and bookstore to carry pro-equality media.
After all, forced speech — according to Exodus’ defenders — what “freedom of speech” is all about.
