TOMS Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie is receiving criticism from gay rights groups after it was revealed that he spoke at a June 30 Focus on the Family event in Orange County.
Focus on the Family makes no bones about their negative views of gay marriage, but Mycoskie has reportedly said he wasn’t aware of the organization’s views in the equality arena. Among other oppressive views, FotF has made stances that – borrowing from LA Weekly – “homosexuality is a mental disorder caused by family problems and bad parenting, that gays want to destroy marriage and the family, that same-gender parents are unfit and seek to hurt children, that homosexuality can be prevented by parents and cured through ‘reparative therapy,’ and that gays are sick, ungodly people who want ‘special rights,’ not civil rights.”
Too bad, because it’s tough not to find any guy under the age of 35, gay or not, NOT rocking a pair of TOMS (including this author right now). The shoes are comfortable, feel like slippers and remain bereft of the noodly flash of most shoe manufacturers. Did Mycoskie know and just didn’t think about the probable boycott? Or was he genuinely unfamiliar and the type of guy who just speaks wherever he’s asked to in representation of his company?
Mycoskie, who lives on a sailboat in Los Angeles, says he simply didn’t know about these things.
“Had I known the full extent of Focus on the Family’s beliefs,” Mycoskie writes in a recent blog post, “I would not have accepted the invitation to speak at their event.”
TOMS has a large gay clientele — take a walk in any gay neighbourhood and you’ll see someone wearing a pair of the slipper-like shoes — and is now ripe for a very public boycott.
Folks on Facebook and elsewhere are willing to take Mycoskie’s word that he made a mistake and didn’t properly vet Focus on the Family.
But it turns out that Mycoskie has spoken at some other hot-button locales in terms of gay rights. This includes a TOMS-related event last year at Texas-based Abilene Christian University, where headlines were made when the college refused to allow a gay-straight alliance to form. Or how about the time he spoke to Willow Creek Community Church, who are known for their belief that gay people can be cured of their gayness.
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