Political Causes
In 2008, CEO Alan Stock donated $9,999 toward the successful passage of California's Proposition 8, an initiative restricting the definition of marriage to opposite-sex couples and overturning the California Supreme Court's ruling that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. An ensuing campaign, launched by opponents to the Prop 8 passage, encouraged patrons to see the Gus Van Sant film Milk, starring Sean Penn in the title role of gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, at a competing theater in protest. Others called for a more general boycott.
Cinemark was the largest contributor to Richard Mourdock's 2012 Indiana Senatorial campaign. During a live debate, Mourdock was asked if abortion should be legal in the case of rape and incest. Mourodck replied: "And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.". In the ensuing brouhaha, Cinemark did not ask its campaign contribution be returned or disassociate itself with Mourdock or his views.
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Famous quotes containing the word political:
“A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“I would wish that the women of our country could embrace ... [the responsibilities] of citizenship as peculiarly their own. If they could apply their higher sense of service and responsibility, their freshness of enthusiasm, their capacity for organization to this problem, it would become, as it should become, an issue of profound patriotism. The whole plane of political life would be lifted.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)