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Thanks a lot Lowe's!

Thanks a lot Lowe's. You just made my bedroom redecoration project more time-consuming, expensive, and inconvenient. So that's how you repay my loyalty.

You've probably heard and read of Lowe's stupid, cowardly, and totally tone-deaf move of pulling its ads from the reality show on TLC that shows an ordinary Muslim family in Michigan going about its daily life. I admit I've never seen "All-American Muslim," not because the idea of the show offends me but because I don't watch reality shows. Period. But from what I've read, the family that is the center of the show is just a typical American family, not so different from my own.

This was too much for the Muslim-haters. The series didn't show the jihadists, they screamed. It didn't show Muslims making bombs or planning to kill innocent Americans, and everybody knows that is how all Muslims spend most of their time. The Muslim-haters' insane complaints reached Lowe's corporate offices and all their spines turned immediately to jelly. They couldn't be associated with a show that incited controversy among the hard right wing, and so they immediately pulled their ads from the show, I guess hoping nobody would notice they had ever been a sponsor. Unfortunately for them, people did notice, including many of us who normally do our shopping for home improvement and gardening supplies at their store.

Lowe's is my closest big box store for house and garden supplies and it generally has good prices, so that has been where I did my shopping. But I cannot support with my hard-earned dollars a company that would be so craven and un-American in its policies. I don't shop at Wal-Mart. How do Lowe's policies make it superior to them?  So now I'll have to find another store for the paint and other supplies I need for my redecoration project. It'll be inconvenient and will mean traveling a few miles farther down the road, but there are a couple of Home Depots that are not too distant. Let's just hope that they don't do something utterly stupid that makes them unworthy of my dollars.

Here's the Daily Show's "Senior Muslim Correspondent" Aasif Mandvi's take on the issue.


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