Jeff’s post on the urchin with the “Boycott CVS sign” sent me googling to find out who was boycotting CVS and why.

For our European readres, CVS, in addition to representing a state-of-the-old-art software version control tool, also is the name of a chain of drugists in the U.S. It’s a rather large chain, and as such it seems at one time or another to have offended all sides of the cultural spectrum here in the United States.

At some point (the date is unclear and I’m having to rely on google’s cache to resurrect the history), some fundamentalist Christians launched a boycott after CVS cut off its funding for the Boy Scouts. According to the fundamentalists, CVS was reacting to the Boy Scouts’ stand on homosexuality:

For the past several years, various businesses have ended their support of the Boy Scouts of America by cutting off their funding. CVS Pharmacy is one of them. The reason was because of the Boy Scout’s stance on not allowing homosexuals into the organization as scout leaders or scouts. We are encouraging all Christians to boycott any business that does this. This is not only an attack against the Scouts. It is also a direct attack on conservative Christians, the authority of the Bible, and our Lord.

More recently, the opposite side of our great cultural divide launched a boycott of their own after a CVS pharmacist refused to fill a woman’s prescription for birth control pills.

One imagines that, the chain having apparently offended everyone, no one now shops at CVS.