One of the featured speakers at this month’s Legatus Summit 2015, which will also include Timothy Cardinal Dolan, will be Peter Coors: current Chairman of the Molson Coors Brewing Company and Chairman of MillerCoors. According to one prestigious business periodical: “The company’s critics say the Coors clan boasts a long record of funding anti-gay groups such as Free Congress and the Heritage Foundation through the family-owned Castle Rock Foundation. Jeffrey Coors, a Free Congress trustee, was the group's chairman in 1996 when it filed a complaint in a Hawaii court case over gay marriage, calling homosexual sex ‘an infamous crime against nature.’” Despite this, Coors bizarrely tries to court the gay consumer with over a decade of flashy and oftentimes vulgar (one in particular I had to heavily censor in order to include it on my blog) advertisements targeting the homosexual market. Yet, these advertisements just don’t celebrate homosexuality in the name of diversity and tolerance, but openly promote it.
Legatus claims to be: “The only organization in the world designed exclusively for top-ranking Catholic business leaders and their spouses.” Their apostolate includes: “...a unique support network of like-minded Catholics who influence the world marketplace and have the ability to practice and infuse their faith in the daily lives and workplaces of their family, friends, colleagues and employees.” With this in mind, how does an image of gay men fornicating in a pool, while drinking Coors beer, or gyrating on a dance floor – pelvis to pelvis, infuse those who suffer from same-sex attraction with a Catholic spirit? Does this not encourage the same sexual cycle of hell in the gay community that, according to the CDC, results in gay men accounting for approximately two-thirds of all new HIV infections in the US; data included in the CDC’s 2013 National HIV Prevention Progress Report also show that there was a 12% increase in new HIV infections among gay and bisexual men overall between 2008 and 2010, and a 22% increase among young gay and bisexual men aged 13-24. Gay and bisexual men also account for over half of the 1.1 million people living with HIV in the United States; in 2012, men who have sex with men accounted for 75% of primary and secondary syphilis cases in the United States. Are Coors and their advertising responsible for this? Of course not. But, it certainly hasn’t helped either.