Jun 25, 2004  |  By: MUBARAK DAHI  | COMMENTS     

TO PARAPHRASE AN adage, you can’t have your mug of beer and drink it, too.

But that’s exactly what members of the Coors family, namesakes of the Coors Brewing Company in Golden, Colo., are trying to get away with among gay customers of their company.

Pete Coors, a former chair of the Coors Brewing Co., is now a Republican candidate for the United States Senate from the state of Colorado.
Pete Coors has also become an outspoken supporter of a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

Political analysts who have been watching the U.S. Senate race in Colorado say Pete Coors took the strong stand that he did — not just against same-sex marriage, but fully in favor of an amendment to enshrine the ban in the Constitution — to appeal to conservatives who make up a substantial base of his candidacy.

Pete Coors’ anti-gay stance on the Federal Marriage Amendment has re-ignited calls from many gay leaders for us to stop buying Coors beer at gay bars.

Furthermore, a large number of Coors family members — who profit directly from the Coors Brewing Co. — are board members of a private institution, the Castle Rock Foundation, which gives away millions of dollars to conservative, anti-gay organizations.

This fact, and its consequences, is even more important for us to consider than Pete Coors’ anti-gay position on the Federal Marriage Amendment.

The Castle Rock Foundation was founded in 1993 with a $36.5 million endowment from the Adolph Coors Foundation.

Since then, it has given away millions of dollars of grants to often conservative, right-wing, anti-gay groups.

According to the group’s Web site, four out of five of the board members of the Castle Rock Foundation are members of the Coors family. Pete Coors is the vice president.

Where did Pete Coors and the other Coors family members on the board of the Castle Rock Foundation get their money and power? Through the Coors Brewing Co.

AND YET, THE Coors Brewing Co. and the Coors family have gone on a public relations blitz to distance themselves from each other.

In a nutshell, they each claim to be independent of one another, and thus not responsible for the others’ actions or stands on gay rights.

In fact, in early June, the Coors Brewing Co. issued a letter stating that Pete Coors’ position on the Federal Marriage Amendment does not reflect the corporate values of the Coors Brewing Co.

The letter stated that the company does not endorse discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people.

In addition, the Coors Brewing Co. has started running full-page ads in gay newspapers and magazines around the country. In the ads, humorously headlined “Straight talk from Coors,” the company goes to some length to describe the positive changes within the company in the past couple of decades with respect to how it treats gay employees.

Most notably, the change is reflected in the company’s nondiscrimination policy, as well as the fact that the company offers health benefits to partners of gay employees.

The Coors Brewing Co. has had a long and tortured history on gay issues, dating back to the early 1970s, when it used to require prospective employees to submit to a lie detector test.

One of the questions on the test was whether or not the hopeful employee was a homosexual.

Outrage over that practice prompted former San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk to kick-off a boycott of the Coors Brewing Co. in 1974.

In 1995, much of the steam of the boycott evaporated when the beer maker instituted its much-friendlier policies toward gay employees.

The company even hired Mary Cheney, Dick Cheney’s famously lesbian daughter, to handle gay outreach.

IRONICALLY, AS FORMER chair of the Coors Brewing Co., Pete Coors has taken much of the credit for advancing the company’s positions on gay employees.

He even claims to have gone out personally to gay bars to promote his beer and his company’s more enlightened
outlook.

Pete Coors’ opponent in the senate race is making much of that history, in an attempt to tarnish Pete Coors with the state’s much-coveted right-wing voters.

So Pete Coors is trying to live down his past, thus embracing the Federal Marriage Amendment with such gusto.

So on the one hand we have the Coors Brewing Co. chatting up gays and extolling the virtues of its corporate policies toward us.

Hey, that Pete Coors guy, he can do whatever he wants as a private citizen, the company seems to be saying; you have to evaluate us independently, on our own policies.

On the other hand, you have Pete ...