SBC says: “LOLZ Starbucks is gay!!1!one1!!!”

As some of you may know, Starbucks is not only my big-market coffeehouse of choice, but also a former employer of mine. As even more of you probably know, the church my family and I were most recently members of (before we moved away) is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. While I wasn’t raised in a Baptist church, and while my religious affections sometimes line up better with those of Presbyterians, I still usually answer “Baptist” when asked what “kind” of Christian I am.

Imagine my eye-rolling, then, when I saw a headline on the Baptist Press News website that read “Starbucks promotes homosexual agenda with coffee cup”. (Yes, those are the exact words. Click for yourself.) Apparently, some folks in my denomination think that simply printing a quote in which someone mentions the fact that he’s gay is a form of “blatantly push[ing] the homosexual agenda”.

See, Starbucks recently started a campaign called “The Way I See It”, in which people (some famous, some not-so-much) submit blurbs to be quoted and printed on their ubiquitous paper cups. These quotes run the gamut: from the intellectual, to the philisophical, to the whimsical, to the downright silly (and some stops in-between). The “controversial” quote in question is from Armistead Maupin, an American author. In it, he speaks of the fear that prevented him from “coming out” as a gay man. To make it worse, he uses an “expletive” (likely damn) in the quote. (Click here to see the actual quote on an actual cup. The “expletive” was censored by BPNews.net.) The mere mention of homosexuality apparently sets off alarms in the minds of uber-conservative public policy group Concerned Women for America, and those bells resound in the minds of some folks at Baptist Press News. Thus far, they’ve stopped short of calling for a boycott of Starbucks, but there are already rumblings of such evident in the article.

Now, the way I see it, this is silly. Starbucks is no more “promoting the homosexual agenda” by printing Maupin’s quote than they are promoting conservatism and the war in Iraq by printing a quote from National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg. (Of course, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if some idiot leftists out there were decrying Starbucks for doing such a thing in much the same fashion as the SBC and CWA.) Granted, the article also speaks of Starbucks’ sponsorship of “gay pride” events in some west-coast cities, but what they fail to realize is that such sponsorships are the prerogative of individual stores and their managers . . . it is not a corporate edict. Furthermore, the participation of the employees in such events is entirely voluntary.

Now, am I saying that sin should be celebrated or even ignored? Of course not. What I am saying is that instead of obsessing over coffee cups and pride marches, perhaps my Baptist brothers’ and sisters’ time and energy would be better spent lovingly showing sinners the freedom that they themselves have found at the Cross.

After all, life is too damn short.

To see some other bloggers’ thoughts on this . . .
Agent Tim Online
Issues that Matter
Virtue Blog
Reformissionary

(It should go without saying that my inclusion of the above links doesn’t constitute my agreement with their contents . . . but Steve McCoy’s got it about right. ;-))