A Denver pastor is literally dumping Starbucks in a show of support for a campaign which aims to boycott the coffee chain for supporting marriage equality. The name of the campaign? Wait for it...
Dump Starbucks. Apt.
"They're trying to undermine the Lord's teaching that God made us male and female at the beginning of creation. A lot of corporations no longer know right from wrong, but Starbucks is pushing it and trying to harm families by what they're doing," says Pastor Bob Enyart in the video above. Enyart then proceeds to dump the contents of his his Venti coffee cup, which he claims he bought before hearing about the Dump Starbucks boycott, into a street sewer.
This movement was originated in March by the National Organization of Marriage in response to Starbucks' pro-marriage equality statement issued two months earlier. The Dump Starbucks website accuses the company of declaring a "culture war on all people of faith (and millions of others) who believe that the institution of marriage as one man and one woman is worth preserving" and encourages people not to fund "this corporate assault on marriage."
Dump Starbucks encourages "traditionalists" to sign their pledge to boycott Starbucks, but an article from the New Civil Rights Movement notes the slow growth of the Dump Starbucks movement:
After 50 days in action, by their own measurement, NOM has managed to attrack only 35,709 “pledges.” That’s a little more than 700 anti-gay people a day — around the world, including some countries where being gay is a crime punishable by death.Yes, after its initial launch, when the National Organization For Marriage apparently recognized its investment in “Dump Starbucks” wasn’t going well, they had the site translated into languages spoken in countries that put gay people to death. Rather than choosing to translate the “Dump Starbucks” boycott into, say, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, or other languages a little closer to home, NOM instead had the site translated into Mandarin, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, and Bahala (one of the chief languages of Indonesia), and NOM president Brian Brown bragged that “DumpStarbucks.com online ads will also start running in Egypt, Beijing, Hong Kong, the Yunnan region of China, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait.”That was almost one full month ago, April 10.Just a little more than a month ago, April 1, NOM’s ”Dump Starbucks” boycott had 25,205 pledges. It’s taken them 35 days to go from 25,205 to 35,709, a difference of 10,504, or 300 pledges a day, a dramatic decrease.
Alternatively, a counter-movement called "Thank You, Starbucks" has over 600,000 signatures, and Starbucks itself certainly isn't hurting over the NOM boycott. A Yahoo! Finance graph of Starbucks' stock when the Dump Starbucks campaign began shows a growth in the company's stock.