Thank You, Starbucks

One of the vendors at the AIDS Benefit Foundation Dessert Finale this past weekend was Starbucks.
I know; they're everywhere.
But it provided an opportunity to say Thanks to Starbucks for their pro-marriage equality stance, and their recent refusal to kowtow to the demands of Maggie Gallagher and NOM when those bigots and haters stormed the Starbucks shareholders meeting and demanded that Starbucks stop being pro-equality. They refused.
From the Sum Of Us website:

Starbucks stuck its neck out to publicly support the right of all people to marry, regardless of the gender of their partner.

Now it is under attack by the ironically-named, ultra-conservative American “National Organization for Marriage”. Already over 4,000 NOM members have pledged to boycott Starbucks.

Let’s blow the right wing out of the water by getting more than ten times as many consumers from around the world to thank Starbucks for standing up for gay marriage.

Join us in showing our support for Starbucks by signing our giant Thank You card. If 40,000 of us sign it, we’ll deliver it to Starbucks executives to give them moral support to keep standing up for equality.

NOM is targeting Starbucks because the company recently stood up publicly to support gay marriage legislation in their home state of Washington in the United States. When it passed, the bill’s lead sponsor said that support from business convinced moderate legislators to vote for it. Without support from companies like Starbucks, the gay marriage law might have failed.

Now, if Starbucks backtracks because of opposition, then it will set the gay rights struggle back to a time when big corporations couldn’t come out and support gay people for fear of public backlash. Even worse, it will embolden anti-gay activists around the world to target other companies that support gay rights, and serve as a lesson to other companies to stay out of the fight for equal rights entirely.

Starbucks isn’t perfect — and in the future we’ll probably be asking it to improve its policies on other issues. But it’s a big deal when a giant multinational corporation with no particular connection to the gay community realizes that there are real business benefits — from better employees to happier customers — to standing up for progressive ideals. As SumOfUs members and ethical consumers, we can’t just criticize corporations when they do bad. We also want to encourage them when they do good.

Let’s show that supporting equal rights is good business: Add your name to our thank you card. 

Here. Go. Now!