Sorry Amazon, Your 'Ham-Fisted' Error Does Not An Apology Make

The PR tides have been rising against Amazon.com and are threatening to spill its #amazonfail-ing flood waters out over the internet plains.

After enduring a weekend of negative Twitter publicity, intense backlash, and widespread criticism for Amazon.com's failure to include LGBTQ and other gay-themed titles in its search results, the company finally issued its first public statement on Monday in response to the massive online controversy.

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What was at first dubbed a "glitch" was quickly dismissed by the public (as the poetic #glitchmyass hashtag made eminently clear)— but Amazon refused to take full responsibility for the so-called "gay blacklist" of 57,310 books and, instead, simply explained that the omission was the result of mis-tagged content and not a hacker or some other form of corporate conspiratorial censorship.

But, although Amazon went so far as to admit that this homophobic and discriminatory cataloging of words written by variously oriented authors was an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" — the company didn't do what everyone had been asking for: apologize.

Nope. Not a word of sorry was issued to everyone who was affected or offended.

Even when the tweets were coming in by the thousands with many digital shakings-of-heads and exasperated exclamations of #amazonfail, the company just sat back and decided to make brief mention of a plan "to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future".

Well, sorry Amazon, that's barely an admission of guilt, let alone an apology.

Now hurry, before the boycott comes, and make us all proud by doing your part to set things...er...straight.

No, wait. Better yet, just apologize and let things be happy and gay again.

The world is waiting, watching, and tweeting for it.