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Coors wants you to help fund
anti-bigotry. Coors wants to have it both ways: Coors wants to continue
to fund the attack on gay rights and Coors also wants lesbians and gay
men to help pay for the attack on gay rights by continuing to buy Coors
beer. Just as Coors is funding the attempt of right-wing groups to
nullify last June's U.S. Supreme Court decision in Grutter v.
Bollinger to uphold affirmative action, so Coors is also continuing
to fund right-wing groups' attempts to foment a right-wing backlash to
nullify the victory in last June's U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Lawrence and Garner v. Texas to strike down Texas' anti-gay
“Homosexual Conduct" law.
Myth: The Coors Company has changed, so the boycott is no longer
necessary.
Fact: The Coors family still supports extreme right wing anti-gay
groups and politicians, through their foundations and individual Coors
family members who profit from the brewery. Coors wants lesbians and gay
men to buy their beer so they can use the profits to fund right wing
attacks on our civil rights. Beneficiaries of the Coors' largesse
include:
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The Heritage
Foundation, founded and financed by Joseph Coors, and most
recently financed to the tune of $1.35 million from 1997 through
2000 by Castle Rock Foundation, a Coors organization created to
conceal the Coors name. William Coors is president of both the
Adolph Coors and Castle Rock Foundations.
Heritage is famous for far right wing attacks on gay rights,
including 1) opposition to the “don't ask, don't tell" policy,
supporting instead the full ban on gay and lesbian service
members, 2) opposition to the Legal Services Corporation (which
provides legal aid to poor people) for giving legal assistance
to gay and lesbian couples seeking to adopt children, and 3)
strongly criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down
Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2 (which banned gay rights laws in
Colorado).
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Jeffrey Coors was
the Free Congress Foundation chair at that time, and a board
member of Castle Rock along with his uncle William Coors.
Jeffrey Coors is still a Free Congress trustee. Free Congress
Foundation filed a friend of the court brief in the Hawaii
same-sex marriage case calling homosexuality “repugnant to…the
laws of nature and nature's God," and reminding the court that
William Blackstone had called sodomy “a crime of deeper
malignancy than even rape…He called sodomy “an infamous crime
against nature." The Free Congress Foundation has received at
least $150,000 per year from Coors' Castle Rock Foundation from
the time Castle Rock was formed in 1993 until at least 2000.
The Free Congress Foundation's website today posts a
“Declaration of Cultural Independence" which states, “Television
‘normalizes' every deviance, including homosexuality and the
inversion of the traditional roles of men and women."
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The Center for
the Study of Popular Culture, David Horowitz' far right wing
group. Horowitz has written demagogically, blaming gay men for
the spread of AIDS. Recently Horowitz put ads in college
newspapers suggesting that black Americans benefited from
slavery.
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The Council for
National Policy, a group of far right wing anti-gay bigots
including Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlaffly, Jerry Falwell,
Oliver North, Gary Bauer, Ralph Reed, Ed Meese, Lon Mabon and
Sen. Jesse Helms.
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Myth: Coors is a model of pro-gay workplace practices and
shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of a few ultraconservative
family members.
Fact: In 1977 lesbian/gay businesses joined an AFL-CIO boycott of
Coors, citing Coors' history of support for attacks on gay rights. Sales
of Coors beer plummeted in the gay community. In response, in 1978 Coors
adopted language against discrimination on account of sexual orientation
in employment, and has offered small sums of money to lesbian/gay
organizations in order to recover beer sales and improve Coors' public
image. But Coors has never stopped funding right-wing attacks on gay
rights.
The lesbian/gay boycott of Coors has hurt Coors so badly that in 1995
Coors was one of the first major corporations to adopt same sex domestic
partner benefits. But this did not mean an end to Coors' continuing
financial support for attacks on gay rights.
Improved working conditions for lesbians and gay men at Coors do not
include union rights and protection. The Coors Company has destroyed 19
unions since 1960, including the Boilermakers, Ironworkers, Electricians
and Plumbers, Pipefitters and Brewers locals. The Coors strategy was to
propose an outrageous and unacceptable “final offer," forcing a union
strike. Coors then hired non-union replacements and conducted union
decertification elections with a majority scab workforce. Today Coors
is the only nonunion mass producer of beer in the country.
Myth: The Coors family is separate from the brewery, so
boycotting Coors won't hurt the family.
Fact: All voting stock in the Adolph Coors Company is owned by
the Adolph Coors Jr. Trust. The Adolph Coors Jr. Trust is controlled by
William Coors and his nephews Peter and Jeffrey Coors. William Coors is
the chairman of Adolph Coors Co, Peter Coors is the director of Adolph
Coors Co and chairman of Coors Brewing Co and Jeffrey Coors is the CEO
of Graphic Packaging International, formerly ACX Technologies, a
spin-off company which sells the brewery its paper and cardboard
packaging, worth $130 million in 2001. Jeffrey is also the chairman of
Castle Rock Foundation.
The Coors businesses make a lot of money. Salaries, bonuses, dividends
and stock options have funneled easily $100 million from the brewery to
members of the Coors family over the last ten years. Professional
managers run the daily operations, but the brewery is still the ongoing
source of the Coors family wealth and of their continuing funding of far
right wing attacks on civil rights.
When the late Joseph Coors' direct funding of far right wing groups such
as the Heritage Foundation became controversial, he and William Coors
founded the Adolph Coors Foundation to put up a paper wall between the
brewery and their gifts to far right wing causes. In 1993 the Castle
Rock Foundation was split off from the Adolph Coors Foundation, to
remove the name of Coors from the more controversial gifts. Castle Rock
took over funding of the Heritage Foundation and Free Congress.
Adolph Coors Foundation and Castle Rock Foundation share the same board,
including William, Peter, Jeffrey and Holly Coors, and the same pool of
assets. Until 1997, both foundations were supported by a large block of
Adolph Coors Company stock. When articles in gay papers exposed the link
between the stock, Castle Rock Foundation and their support for anti-gay
groups, the foundations sold their Adolph Coors Co stock and bought an
equivalent block of ACX Technologies, Jeffrey Coors' spin-off company,
stock they still hold.
Resources:
“Coors and the LGBT Community" by
Bruce Mirken
Heritage Foundation
www.heritage.org
Free Congress Foundation
www.freecongress.org
“Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty" by Daniel Baum
“The Coors Connection" by Russ Bellant
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