No, the Starbucks CEO did NOT say that he didn’t want conservative customers. And about the lesbians are fat study….

For the record, here is what the Starbucks CEO said, and in context:

Howard Schultz, the outspoken CEO of global coffee chain Starbucks, calmly but firmly defended his company’s support of same-sex marriage last week at a shareholder meeting.

In response to a challenge from a shareholder that the company’s support of same-sex marriage was hurting the company’s stock price, Schultz explained that it’s not about the bottom line but about “respecting diversity,” according to KPLU-FM, a local affiliate of NPR.

Last year, the Seattle-based company openly supported Washington state’s referendum that legalized same-sex marriage. As a result, the National Organization for Marriage launched a boycott of the coffee giant. During the company’s annual meeting in Seattle last week, shareholder Tom Strobhar spoke up, suggesting that the boycott was affecting the company’s stock value: “In the first full quarter after this boycott was announced, our sales and our earnings — shall we say politely — were a little disappointing,” he said.

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Schultz shot back that Starbucks’ endorsement of marriage equality wasn’t bad for business:

“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 of Starbucks and buy shares in another company. Thank you very much,” Schultz said, to applause from the audience.

But Schultz was quick to underscore that it wasn’t even an economic decision to support gay rights. It was simply right for its people. “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,” he retorted.

This had NOTHING to do with customers; this was only a reply to someone who thought that the company’s endorsement of same sex marriage had hurt its stock prices.

Of course that is too subtle for some people:

(facepalm)

And about Rush Limbaugh talking about the “why are lesbians fat” study: here is information about the real study:

The study, according to its abstract, is in fact examining the connection between obesity and sexual orientation. But there’s more here than the knee-jerk (and not very subtle) lesbian fat joke. It’s important to remember that nearly half of straight women are obese, too, and that the study is also figuring out why straight men are more often overweight than gay men:

It is now well-established that women of minority sexual orientation are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic, with nearly three-quarters of adult lesbians overweight or obese, compared to half of heterosexual women. In stark contrast, among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males. Despite clear evidence from descriptive epidemiologic research that sexual orientation and gender markedly pattern obesity disparities, there is almost no prospective, analytic epidemiologic research into the causes of these disparities.

In short, it is seeing if there is any causation to sexual orientation and obesity; either way, for either sex.

Oh boy…if you chat on the internet for any time at all, you can see evidence that many people simply don’t understand what they read (and that is a politically neutral condition)

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