Mr. David B. Dillon, Chairman and CEO, The Kroger Company

June 7, 2013

Dear Mr. Dillon

When I learned that the Kroger Company is sponsoring the Homosexual Activists Sex Parade in Cincinnati this coming June 19, I was dismayed.  When I went to the Kroger website, I became even more concerned when I read the first two sentences.  “The Kroger Company values honesty, integrity, safety, diversity, inclusion and respect.  We look for those qualities in the associates we hire.”

Obviously there is no problem with four of those six criteria, but your support of the gay parade raises questions about what Kroger means by diversity and inclusion since those words are sometimes used to advance the gay agenda.  You are giving your shareholders’ money to those who are trying to persuade or force the country to accept sodomy as a legitimate form of marriage.  Will you be trying to find out what your employees and vendors believe about these matters?  Would you deny employment to someone who is not afraid to say he or she believes that the biblical teaching of exclusively heterosexual marriage is correct?

The issue has nothing to do with respect for all individuals.  No one is asking you to not employ or to disemploy men and women based on their sexual orientation.  What the issue is all about is whether certain activists can persuade this country to call sodomy a form of marriage.  What the issue is ultimately all about is whether God has a plan for love, marriage and sexuality, whether God has created man and woman to be complementary and to marry with the anticipation that their sexual union will yield babies, and whether God has created marriage as exclusively a male-female relationship.

No culture on earth has ever called sodomy “marriage.”  The biblical account tells us that there were many men practicing sodomy in the city from which it gets its name, but no one was calling it marriage.  It is very strange that a publicly owned corporation is using its resources and good name to intervene in this battle, and it is especially strange for it to back the side that wants to destroy the traditional concept of exclusively heterosexual marriage.

My request: please disengage immediately from your current stand.  Return to a state of neutrality in the moral and religious war about same-sex marriage.

I need to hear that you have returned to a state of neutrality regarding same-sex marriage and thus are not funding efforts such as the gay parade.

Cordially,

John F. Kippley