HOME > VIEWPOINT > ACTION! ALERT
By: BO SHELL
COMMENTS |
| 
After years as one of Starbucks’ frequent customers, Meghan Kleppinger says she is calling it quits.
Kleppinger, assistant to the national field director at the conservative Concerned Women for America, vowed in an Aug. 10 column published on WorldNetDaily.com that she would boycott the coffee chain. Starbucks supports “the homosexual agenda,” including this year’s San Diego Pride, Kleppinger wrote.
Citing an e-mail from the California chapter of CWA that called San Diego’s annual Gay Pride event “a festival with sexually oriented venues,” she described the Pride Parade as “pretty disturbing.”
Kleppinger said she was most alarmed that the two-day festival included activities for children, since it was discovered that at least two registered sex offenders volunteered to assist San Diego Pride with this year’s festival.
“If Starbucks is doing this knowingly, it is blatant irresponsibility, and if they are doing it unknowingly, it is irresponsible of them not to have done their homework. … All I could think was ‘Starbucks hates children,’” she wrote.
Kleppinger could not be reached for comment.
THREE MEN connected to San Diego Pride were discovered to be sex offenders, according to a statement read by San Diego Pride Co-Chair Philip Princetta at an Aug. 15 meeting at the San Diego LGBT Community Center.
All were convicted of committing sexual acts with minors, and resigned from the organization before the festivities began. One of the three was a part-time employee of San Diego Pride, one was a paid contract laborer and the third was a volunteer, according to Princetta.
Alan Hilowitz, Starbucks’ media manager, said the company was aware that the sex offenders volunteered for the Pride Festival and subsequently resigned before the event began.
The company paid a fee to provide samples of several products during the festival and also had employees who walked in the parade.
Hilowitz could not say if Starbucks would support San Diego Pride again, but stressed that the company has championed diversity since its inception.
“As a company committed to embracing diversity and inclusion, we welcome differing points of view and realize that people express their opinions in many ways, including the Internet and in articles,” Hilowitz said.
KLEPPINGER ALSO TAGGED Starbucks for celebrity quotes printed on coffee cups as a part of the chain’s “The Way I See It” campaign.
“Nearly all of them are liberal celebrities,” Kleppinger said.
The campaign features quotes from several gay celebrities including singer–songwriter Rufus Wainwright, musician Stephin Merritt and author Armistead Maupin.
“My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it so long,” Maupin says in his quotation. “I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.”
Conservative voices from talk show radio host Michael Medved and columnist Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online are also featured on Starbucks cups.
The company earned a score of 86 out of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality index in 2004. The company earned points for same-sex partner benefits and a non-discrimination policy that includes sexual orientation, but was chided for lacking policies protecting transgendered employees.
Starbucks also supports a variety of conservative and liberal non-profits through in-kind donations and employee volunteerism, Hilowitz said. The chain employs approximately 90,000 workers in more than 9,000 stores around the world.
When businesses choose to support gay causes, they’ve often considered the potential reaction from their customer base, said Pam Scholder Ellen, associate professor of marketing at Georgia State University.
“Starbucks knows that there are likely to be detractors—people who do not believe in those same causes or want the company to invest differently,” she said. “They know that customers can vote with their feet both coming and going.”
| 
