You know things are bad when Coca-Cola’s hired thugs are assaulting LGBT protestors in Sochi, and the company confirms that they’re not sorry. Out in the City and G3 Magazine Awards (a British awards thingy) just dumped Coke from their list of nominees. Trinity College has banned all Coke products for the duration of the Olympics, and Wesleyan students held a coke-dumping rally. Organizers are now pulling together an “Anything But Coke” campaign.
So we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the company is now blocking the words “gay” and “lesbian” from a weird promotion on their website.
The whole idea is actually pretty dumb: Coke has a site where you can type a word and then that word will appear on a virtual can of Coke. Why would you want this? How is this promoting anything? Who could possibly care about this terrible idea?
The whole thing would have died in obscurity if someone hadn’t noticed that while you are allowed to write “straight” or “hetero” on your can, the site bans “gay” as a bad word. Whoops. This is probably due to laziness on Coke’s part — most likely, they just purchased a cheap bad-words list such as the one that prevents you from naming your Pokémon “Vulva,” and didn’t bother to check it for words that shouldn’t be banned.
But so far there’s been no apology from Coke (surprise) and no fix to the website. And plenty of other anti-gay slurs (“faggy,” etc) are still allowed. Oh well.
Swearing off Coke products isn’t easy, of course, since they own so many different beverages. Fortunately, Coke has assembled a helpful list of all the brands that we’re boycotting now.