coffee tastes better with honesty

Since I've deactivated my Facebook account I'm not sure how much of an uproar people have made about a recent story about the Starbucks CEO.  It was reported that he said he didn't want to do business with people who support traditional marriage, and I've seen this spin on several blogs and twitter accounts.

Here's the thing, as a Catholic I totally get how people can take what I do/say/believe and twist into a half truth or a full-on lie. I've seen people leave the Roman Catholic Church because they read the book Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic. The book is a joke - the author, Christ Castaldo, readily admits that he was raised in a nominally Catholic home, barely going to Sunday Mass, that that they stopped attending all together by the time he was a teen. He claims to be an authority on the faith even though he was obviously barely catechized and reading through the book he clearly understands very little about what the Church actually teaches. I know second graders preparing for their First Holy Communion who could better explain what the Catholic Church actually teaches than Castaldo does. Over and over again he takes his poor understanding of Scripture, Church history, and Church teachings and misrepresents them as he portrays himself as an authority.

It's sad to see that people have abandoned the faith they were baptized into and raised in because they read Castaldo's and other, similar books. Instead of going to actual sources - like a parish priest, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or books and websites written by people who claim to be faithful to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church - they did incredibly poor research and relied on pathetic sources. If their faith journey were a research paper they would fail for using such pathetic resources.

So what does all this have to do with Starbucks? Well, the CEO didn't actually say what people are saying he said. What he actually said was:

“Not every decision is an economic decision. Despite the fact that you recite statistics that are narrow in time, we did provide a 38% shareholder return over the last year. I don’t know how many things you invest in, but I would suspect not many things, companies, products, investments have returned 38% over the last 12 months. Having said that, it is not an economic decision to me. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people. We employ over 200,000 people in this company, and we want to embrace diversity. Of all kinds.

If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return than the 38% you got last year, it’s a free country. You can sell your shares in Starbucks and buy shares in another company. Thank you very much.” 

I know there a many people who try not to patronize companies that support beliefs that are contrary to their own. No Disney, no Girl Scouts, no Oreos, no Susan G. Komen, no Starbucks. Personally I support some of them and some of them I intentionally do not support. It all comes down to doing your research, finding the truth (because the media probably won't give it you and you'll have to check multiple sources and wade through the spin), and considering how what you've learned impacts your convictions.

Don't leave the Church because you read a stupid Jack Chick tract and don't stop buying Starbucks only because someone tells you that its CEO doesn't want your business because you support traditional marriage.

You can read more about the Starbucks CEO's comments here or here.