Poll: Do you think that nonreligious businesses should take religious and/or political stances?

The purpose of a business is to maximize profit. Nothing else really. When a business get involved in a complex and controversial political issue, or even worse, a religious issue, first of all there's the suspicion that the managers of the business are only pandering to one side of an issue to win their loyalty, and secondly there's always the chance their involvement will backfire on them, as it did with Chick-Fil-A, and end up costing them business. Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but he should express that opinion in a way that doesn't involve the business.

There's another fast food chain whose owners decided to put a biblical verse on the bottom of their drink cups. They didn't advertise it, they didn't say out loud that anyone who didn't believe the Bible was going to Hell so they were unwelcome in their restaurants. But people who knew about it (and the word got around!) could turn over their drink cup and find a book/chapter/verse reference they could look up. I liked that idea a lot better.

But suppose the owner or head guy of a big chain of restaurants or grocery stores or hardware stores was to come out and say Hispanics are destroying this country, so we don't want Hispanics in our stores. It would make a lot of people angry, it would THRILL some people, and it would get the store a lot of publicity for a few days. But in the end it would cost them a lot of business and hurt their reputation and that 'good will' that a store can't buy. It would hurt them in the end a lot more than it helped them.