All right. To summarize your points. You said (1)most boycotts are completely counter-productive [Certainly I can say that not all boycotts are productive]. (2) The Last Temptation of Christ would have been a movie that none of us had heard of except for the religious groups that protested it...for the most part, the publicity that boycotts create almost always backfires on the protestors.
You made a near absolute statement: "that boycotts create almost always backfires on the protesters."
If that was the case, any criticism of any horrid play, movie, TV show, book, Web site or supposed piece of art would almost never be justified, because publishing crits would always draw attention in feeding the publicity hounds of these products.
My analogy to Sodom & Gomorrah is that God gave His reacting to blasphemous, unnatural lifestyles and general evil in those communities plenty of press by destroying it.[The Bible is the world's best-seller, so you couldn't give it more press than that!]. In other words, God placed the ultimate boycott upon Sodom & Gomorrah so that no one would do business with that city again!
Are you saying that boycott by God backfired on Him? There are things so provocative that to not react means that we become numb, desensitized, and calloused about evil. When that happens, we all become like spiritual lepers who not only fail to feel and be sensitive to touch and pain, etc, but we spread that disease to others.
God felt that putting certain cities up on a pedastal as a negative example of a way to live [which is, simply put, the partial definition of a boycott], outweighed the fallout of shining a light on dark activity (cause any time you shine a light on dark activity, you also get the attention of the curiosity mongers).
Bad publicity is always two-sided. The curiosity-mongers interested in the latest worldly "revelation" are magnetized to the latest controversy. BUT! Filmmakers of potentially controversial products AND their corporate funders take note as well. Let's face it, network TV would be filled with even more outrageous showings if the networks thought they could do so controversy-free, because corporate America is still skittish to some degree. Attention drawn by lightning rods is not simply an overwhelming negative thing.
Another small angle is that crap like "The Last Temptation of Christ" and other similar putrescence already had or have all kinds of raving, positive publicity. What are conservatives supposed to do, lie down and play dead?
Being wimpy, spineless, weakling Mr. Nice guy - or ostriches - has gotten us where we are today.
I guess the real point is whether we consider crap to be detrimental or a positive thing.