Starbucks Holiday Cups Criticized, This Time Over Gay Couple

SEATTLE, WA - It's now as much of a tradition as the holiday cups themselves: people getting angry about what Starbucks puts on them. This year - the 20th year of the holiday cup tradition - some people think the cups feature a gay couple holding hands.

This year's cups feature illustrations of Christmas trees, wrapped gifts, and hearts, but there's also a couple holding hands. More specifically, it's an illustration of just the forearms and hands of the couple, but you can't tell whether the hands belong to a straight married couple, a gay couple, or two family members.

But, Starbucks also released a video to promote the cups, which began circulating on Nov. 1. The video shows two women holding hands over a cup of Starbucks, leading some to deduce that the disembodied hands on the cups belong to those women.

Here's the video:

People on Twitter, naturally, are leading the anti-Starbucks charge this year using the #BoycottStarbucks hashtag.

"[C]an’t u guys just make coffee and leave your political crap out of it? I really hope you have alternative non lesbian cups for non gay people. leave coffee out of politics this is getting old!" a person with the handle "Freedom Fighter" wrote on Twitter.

Starbucks hasn't said either way whether the cups feature a gay couple. Buzzfeed published an article discussing whether the cups are "gay," and some people think the cups are, in fact, gay.

Last year, Starbucks' cups were criticized for not being holiday-themed enough. The were just red, no illustrations.

The Starbucks cup controversy follows a recent boycott of Keurig. Fox News watchers began smashing their Keurig coffee machines after the company stopped advertising on Fox News because of host Sean Hannity's defending accused pedophile and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Image courtesy of Starbucks