One Million Moms has turned its fire on Etsy (Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA/LightRocket/Getty)
Lock up your children or Etsy will trick them into buying sex dolls for Father’s Day, so says One Million Moms.
Fresh from boycotting Cadbury’s, eHarmony and Oreos, the puritanical campaign group has now declared war on the humble arts and crafts marketplace, Etsy.
Why? Well according to One Million Moms, Etsy is “no longer a family-friendly website” as it’s now selling “graphic nude photos and sex toys including sex dolls”.
It’s a strange pivot for a site mostly populated with personalised Live Laugh Love decor, but look closer and you’ll see it’s turned into “an online sex store”, according to the bizarre claim.
“Etsy has become an adult themed store by including everything a fantasy store would sell,” the group alleged in its latest petition.
“The site doesn’t ask for age verification before viewing nude photos, and very few are pixelated or blurred for discretion.
“Our concern is that someone may stumble upon the images at any time, but especially in the coming weeks while searching for Father’s Day gifts.”
The horror!
For the more discerning fathers, there are also “full nudity pictures, pinups, and posters of both heterosexual and homosexual partners engaging in sex,” the petition continues.
“It is disgusting that Etsy has made this decision to become an online sex store rather than stick to its original policies of handcrafted and handmade items for sale from individual to individual.”
Etsy allows users to market and sell a broad range of handmade products, and has always allowed explicit content on a restricted basis.
But enough is enough for One Million Moms, which is operated by the anti-LGBT+ American Family Association and has just 4,153 mostly-male Twitter followers.
The group is known to only have one full time employee, director Monica Cole, who urged her supporters to “take action” and demand that Etsy “return to its roots of not selling third party items unless vintage”.
That might be a problem for Etsy as the vast majority of its sellers operate as a third party and are not actually employed by the website – but rational demands have never been high on One Million Moms’ list of priorities.
As usual the petition has fallen far short of a million, claiming to have just 15,000 signatures. Etsy has yet to comment.