A couple days ago I posted that the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which advocates for restricting the legal definition of marriage to one man and one woman, had announced an international protest of Starbucks over the company’s support of marriage equality.
How is that protest going? Not so good, according to ThinkProgress:
The National Organization for Marriage’s decision to boycott Starbucks for the company’s support of the freedom to marry has turned out to be a dismal failure. In the five days since NOM launched its “Dump Starbucks” petition, it has only gotten 19,000 signatures, compared to the nearly 250,000 individuals who have signed SumOfUs’s retaliatory “Thank You, Starbucks” card. In fact, SumOfUs has gotten over 8,000 new signers since 8:30 this morning.
Not only is NOM’s petition failing when it comes to numbers, it’s also failing when it comes to authenticity. As Jeremy Hooper has tracked, Dump Starbucks counts any information that is submitted, but that hasn’t stopped NOM from boasting about its campaign repeatedly all weekend. Worse yet, it seems that the site can’t even provide an accurate count of who is signing — either that or the organization is intentionally manipulating the numbers to make the petition look more successful that it is, which of course it isn’t anyway.