Short version: Drew, their employee with the most public facing role and known to be a chill guy and left-leaning, left the company with some celebration but zero explanation. This got folks looking, and they saw that the Goulets are heavily involved with planting (think “franchising” or may more accurately “metastasizing”) a new church that was growing out from a larger one that has all the usual disgusting anti-LGBT+ rhetoric, and the new church has a mission statement that includes bible literalism and explicitly places men above women in home life and church roles. Also, Reddit being Reddit, the mods handled it all very clumsily and in a way that makes it look they’ve traded their integrity for a couple of pens.
That much is certainly fair. I can’t imagine that he didn’t have some inkling of their beliefs, as it’s almost impossible not to in a small workplace like that. It seems like more than anything, his leaving was just the call to action that led to things being uncovered independently.
I suppose one could read the tea leaves all along and guess that a southern, white family that is eager to proclaim their Christianity is likely involved in some conservative stuff, but there’s still a basic social contract in the US that you can “opt out” of the culture wars publicly if you do so consistently. If they don’t push it on the details, and they are supportive of things like an annual pride month sale, then maybe there’s nuance to their belief system that they are entitled to work out in private. I think when you make a show of getting involved in expanding that realm, to be literally evangelical by spreading a faith that a lot of us think is pretty toxic, that you burn through a lot of goodwill pretty quickly. Add it on to how milquetoast they were about the Noodlers stuff, and it’s enough to make me want to shop elsewhere, regardless of whether the Drew stuff is directly related.
On a personal level, I have met many evangelicals who I think are legitimately kind as they understand that word, but they no NOT fuck with any unorthodoxy.
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That’s the last round of fountain pen drama. The owner of Noodlers Ink is your sort of standard issue “I’m a very smart Libertarian committed to pure reason!” type, but he was putting some pretty cliche and well known anti-Semitic tropes on his self-designed ink bottles, stuff like drawing little horns on Ben Bernanke’s head.
The Goulets spent a fair amount of time and energy defending him as a good guy who just wasn’t familiar with this stuff and didn’t make the connection before now, before finally joining the chorus and asking for the inks to be changed.
In isolation, their response wasn’t the biggest issue in the world, but it does seem to fit a pattern of using politeness as a cover for tolerating or supporting some yucky stuff.
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