NOM Expands Their Starbucks Boycott Into Nations That Criminalize Homosexuality

In what may be their single-most outrageous and repulsive move yet, NOM is attempting to whip up anti-gay fervor by expanding their Starbucks boycott into nations that may put homosexuals to death or have other legal punishments for merely being gay.

Brian Brown exults:

In our first week, we gained 25,000 pledge signers in the U.S. alone; today we go international, expanding DumpStarbucks.com campaigns into Mandarin, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, and Bahala (one of the chief languages of Indonesia) 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. What happens in Seattle won’t to stay in Seattle. By making gay marriage core to his brand, Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz is telling millions of customers and partners who support traditional marriage in the Middle East, China, South America and North America that they aren’t truly part of the Starbucks community.”

Obviously the ads in Arabic and other languages won’t be seen only in the nations where the ad buys are made. The internet, after all, has no boundaries. But here’s what goes on just a few of countries targeted by NOM:

United Arab Emirates: Homosexuals can be put to death.
Kuwait: Homosexuals can be imprisoned for ten years.
Oman: Homosexuals can be imprisoned up to three years.

It cannot be any plainer. Taking a page from Scott Lively, NOM is intent on whipping up anti-gay hatred in nations where our brothers and sisters already live their lives in quiet terror at best.

UPDATE: There is some disagreement regarding the UAE gay death penalty, which I’ve linked from Wikipedia. The ILGA says that issue is unclear.



Whether sodomy is punished with death penalty remains in dispute. The Arabic text of article 354 is ambiguously phrased and can be translated in different ways. Some sources indicate that the article punishes rape of a woman or forced sodomy with a man, while others indicate that it punishes rape on women and sodomy between men.