Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

Matt Barber's job at the right-wing activist group Concerned Women for America seems to be to get mad about something and write a bleating press release or blog post about said maddening matter. His official title is Policy Director for Cultural Issues. His oddly reasoned missives turn up frequently on blogs that keep track of these kinds of things like Pam's House Blend and -- with a very different style, but similarly unrelenting focus -- G.A.Y.

We'd usually leave the tracking of the right-wing rantings to them, but one of Barber's posts popped up on our screeners because it mentioned that local coffee outfit, Starbucks. Apparently, it was a slow week for Barber after the hate crimes bill passed. So slow, that he was reduced to reading the stuff printed on his Starbucks cups. And he still doesn't like what he sees there.

Java giant Starbucks finds itself entangled in yet another brewing controversy over its "The Way I See It" campaign. Starbucks has a history of placing liberal, pro-homosexual and anti-God statements submitted by customers, celebrities and other public figures on the side of its coffee cups for customers to contemplate while they wash down a muffin with a Frappe-Mocha-whatever.

Although the company has every right to do what it wants with its cups, one questions whether it makes good business sense to intentionally alienate a large percentage of the coffee drinking public with these inflammatory political musings. Many customers with traditional values find it quite offensive. Although the company has used some religion oriented statements in the past -- such as one by Purpose Driven Life author Rick Warren -- the preponderance of politically and spiritually themed quotes that make the "cup cut" seem to represent a hard-left ideology.

I know... it's difficult to believe that a company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, would labor under such a leftist bent, but sadly, such is the case.

Yikes! Seattle! Here offers the name of our town as though the good chief's name alone is enough to get his readers riled.

Barber offers several examples of the "hard-left ideology" he found on the cups. Among them:

The Way I See It # 43 ? "My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. 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 d*mn short." -- Armistead Maupin, Homosexual Novelist

Barber suggests that his readers should submit their own (presumably hard-right) alternative quotations to a Starbucks website. His offering:

The Way I See It # ?? ? "Why do so many in our fallen world revile God's natural order when it comes to marriage, family and human sexuality? Why do we encourage wicked pride in a morally bankrupt, high-risk lifestyle that's anything but 'gay'? Why do we shake our fist with hate at perfect Love? Life is short -- but it's never too late for change."

Hmm. Maupin just seems nicer, somehow.

Given the genesis of the company's name, we'd like to see this admittedly complex sentence from Moby Dick:

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own." -- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Ch. 49

We suspect that Barber would feel better about Starbucks if he'd run across this Chicago "partner" described in a letter to Windy City Times. (Although the situation described appalls us.):

When I approached the counter to order my drink, an employee was sitting at a table, apparently on his break, talking to another employee who was making a drink for him. I walked up just as he was telling her that, because she is gay, she is no different from a serial killer or a child molester. The woman responded by saying that she was the way God made her and that certainly wasn't wrong in her opinion. At that point, he walked up to the counter to get his drink, looked at me, and said: "I'm just sayin' it's evil."

Labels: activism, business, link bites, Seattle