I’ve written about private economic retaliation against speakers (see PDF pp. 11-30) in the past, including on this blog. I don’t want to repeat all that here, but I want to point to a new such incident: A decision by the Legal Writing Institute to refuse to patronize a hotel because its owner contributed to an anti-same-sex-marriage ballot initiative.
Naturally, the hotel owner is unlikely to be bankrupted by this one incident; but I take it that people who engage in such refusals to deal often hope that many others will join in, and put still more pressure on the speaker or political contributor. And of course the Dixie Chicks didn’t have their careers ended as a result of the boycott. So the analogy seems quite close, and in my article and posts I pointed to still more such incidents, such as boycotts or proposed boycotts of businesses that contribute to Operation Rescue, to pro-life candidates and ballot measures, to Planned Parenthood, and to anti-race-preferences initiatives. In any case, I thought this was worth highlighting, as an interesting example of a broader practice.