But why? Do they think it will turn them gay?
What with Hobby Lobby, Chick fil A, and other right-wing and/or religious businesses flaunting their faith or even enforcing it on employees, it’s good to see a chain—a big one—come out in favor of gay rights.
It’s Burger King, which, in early July, briefly sold a “Proud Whopper” in San Francisco (sadly, in only one store). Still, that’s something:
And KENS5, a San Antonio (Texas) news station reports:
The downtown San Francisco Burger King sold Proud Whoppers last weekend, during the parade and also passed out some 50,000 rainbow Burger King crowns, that were worn by parade participants and spectators. The video, created by the Miami office of Burger King’s ad agency David, captures customers discussing whether or not the burger, itself, is different. At $4.29 it costs the same as a conventional Whopper. And, indeed, customers ultimately discover the only difference is the rainbow wrap.
All Proud Whopper sandwich sales, Machado [head of BK international brand marketing] says, will be donated to the Burger King McLamore Foundation for scholarships benefiting LGBT high school seniors graduating in spring 2015.
Unsurprisingly, the American right just can’t leave this alone. The Raw Story reports some pushback from the odious American Family Association:
The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer voiced his concern on Friday over the idea that a new Burger King item honoring LGBT Pride events in San Francisco could be sold in other parts of the country, Right Wing Watch reported.
“If this isn’t bottled up in San Francisco, this kind of nonsense, then it’s going to be spreading across the entire fruited plain,” Fischer complained. “And you’re going to be going to your Burger King in Des Moines, Iowa and you’re going to have a rainbow color wrapper for your Whopper.”
I can’t help but think that “fruited plain” (which comes from one line of the patriotic song “America the Beautiful“) is a sly and denigrating reference to gays, which in my youth used to be called “fruits” (pejoratively, of course).
The burger chain featured the “Proud Whopper” earlier this month at one San Francisco location, bearing rainbow-colored packaging and the phrase, “We are all the same inside” on the inside of the wrapper. The company also posted a video of people ordering and reacting to the promotion.
“I cried in there,” one woman said in the video. “A burger has never made me cry before.”
Fischer scoffed at the tearful reaction, and suggested that his group would try to do an “action alert” to protest to the company.
“I gotta tell you, I think this is a marketing mistake,” he said. “I think this is a bonehead move from a marketing standpoint. Because I gotta guarantee you, when people sit down to eat a hamburger, the last thing they want to be thinking about is two guys having sex.”
Yeah, as if that’s what they’d be thinking about. And I seriously doubt that Burger King has lost any business.
h/t: Ginger
LOL. At least now we know what’s going on inside Mr. Fischer’s head when he thinks about homosexuality.
Surely it’s a human right to consume a burger without having to think of a big fat dick playing with another big fat dick.
Poor Mr. Fischer.
I thought the same. Instead of thinking about inclusion, he’s thinking about what goes on in the bedroom. I wonder if he thinks about heterosexuals that way when he eats a regular burger. LOL! Does this guy even understand the depth of human relationships sexual or not?
I just think it’s hilarious how his brain apparently associates a rainbow-colored burger wrap with two guys getting it on.
The involuntary mental leap from burger to bedroom is comedy gold! 😀
And what about a hypothetical He is Born burger? Would we to get all hung up b/c it makes us think of Mary gettin’ it on with God? Nah.
I thought that involved a golden shower?
No, that’s the other royal demigod with a name ending in “seus” born according to prophesy of the holy non-matrimonial union of a virgin woman and the heavenly father who had to flee to foreign lands to escape certain death at the hands of an homocidal member of the royalty whose name starts with “Her.” It’s difficult to confuse them, I know…the easiest way to remember the difference is that YHWH liked to have an audience supply play-by-play commentary (“The Annunciation,” “The Magnificat,” etc.) and an open field whereas Zeus preferred the privacy of a prison cell deep in a cave for the deed.
Cheers,
b&
Ummm, the last thing I want to think about when having a burger is a cow getting slaughtered!!
If Mr. Fischer needs help, he can watch this scene from Apocalypse Now which should at first really turn him off of burgers, and then ask himself if thinking about gay sex instead isn’t an improvement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhoyhVjH9tE
That said, I spent gay pride day in San Francisco at the SF opera and while I also caught about an hour of the parade, I’m sad I missed out on the Burger King thing. This is the first I’ve heard of it.
Rats. No streaming that clip in this country.
I can relate, but also find it fascinating that the idea of killing something in order to eat seems so alien to many people.
I buy organic dairy, meat and eggs because of animal welfare, but have no issue being a slave of my carnivorous instincts.
I quite enjoy them to be honest. 🙂
I’d rather think about a cow getting humanely slaughtered while eating a hamburger than “Hey, wasn’t there a recall on this meat due to E coli contamination?”
Or “What is the actual incidence of CJD in this country?”
Completely forgot about mad cows last time I was in the UK (early 90s) and didn’t hesitate to get the roast beef and Yorkshire pud at a student caf in Oxford. I was staying with vegetarians so had to lash out when I was on my own. It’s very unlikely I’ll ever go spongiform from that one lapse, but if I could have been exposed to HIV instead, at least I’d know for sure.
Well, it’s hardly something that slips my mind when I (searches for words) ingest a commercial mass-produced sludge burger (Ye Ghods, I recall the last McSludge I had, as the only identifiable food in the 5 minutes I had to make my train while travelling across Korea. 5 years later and it still makes me shake!). I have less of a problem with remembering it when I tuck into a good home-made one, but I did my remembering of the cow (or deer ; we had some excellent deer-burgers last weekend) when we brought the mince.
Well, I rather thought that was the point – we’re not all the same on the inside ; all of us have mouths (well, I hope so ; I’ve not heard of an “anoral” developmental defect) and anuses, but some also have vaginas. That’s rather the point. Of course, which available orifice you use for which copulation is very much a matter of mutual preference. Which is also very much part of the point. There wouldn’t be anything like so much fun if we were all the same on the inside.
Unless, of course, Burger King are thinking of their customers in a very Hannibal-Lecter-with-an-industrial-mincer sort of way. Which they may do.
Soylent-rainbow burger, anyone? Something equally representative of all kingdoms, phyla, and the wide, wide range of sexual histories of organisms. But I suppose that would have to include the bacteria too.
“But I suppose that would have to include the bacteria too.”
Oh, don’t worry, they’re already there.
I wonder what Mr Fischer would do if BK started selling hot dogs.
🙂
Good one!
Well.. there are these old jokes about many beers making potential sex partners look better and better…..eat to many burgers and who knows? (Actually if you eat to many burgers your chances of success probably decrease)
But then again we had the Hindus making a huge fuss because apparently there was some beef byproduct in the frying oil.
Oh the humanity
Maybe they might want to look at what other Christians are doing. There are several mainstream churches around here with rainbow designs and words like ‘inclusive’ in their postings.
We are all the same on the inside. Now that’s one subversive message.
And the right wing wants to make sure that “that kind of nonsense” doesn’t spread. What’s sad is that they believe their garbage.
It would be inappropriate for me to comment on the consequences of a Christian eating a Gay Pride burger… but you get the idea.
True – no true Christian wants to think about the consequences of putting a piece of meat in his mouth.
Every time they have the Eucharist they take Jesus in their mouths. And then rinse him down with a bit of his blood. Whether they’re a sect that believes this is happening literally or figuratively, it’s a pretty gross image.
You think it might stick in their mouth and possibly make them gag?
Thinking too hard about stuff like this can tend to make one a little Haggard.
Why is it always two guys having sex? Seems to me that that is all this guy Fischer thinks about.
Ha ha, it would be funny to be there and just remark, “curious that you didn’t imagine the two women having sex”. Then just fade into the crowd.
Fantasy vs heresy
Hardcore Christians are obsessed with sex, even more than teenagers are.
Frankly, I know plenty of hetero couples who are wonderful people, but I sure do not want to think about what they get up to in the bedroom. So I just don’t. It’s really not that difficult.
Would that explain the success rate of abstinence-based sex education at spreading STIs and pregnancy then?
Mormons and Catholics have got to be some of the most visible organizations concerned with the prohibition of pre-marital sex and yet those two organization have got to have some of the most kids at an early age of any other group on the planet.
Hypocrisy in religion? Never!
Regarding your login name, I’m curious as to whether you deliberately changed the spelling of Quixote and if so, what you intended to convey by the alteration.
You mean the fact that he/she used the original, correct spelling of the name of the Spanish novel character?
I didn’t know it was the original spelling, but I’d noted that for a native English-speaker it’s a spelling that helps to get the pronunciation closer to what Cervantes expected.
You will see both spellings of the name here in Spain. I live in Galicia and the letter “x” is pronounced like the English sound “sh”. For that reason we mostly use the jota. Confusingly, their is no jota in the Galician language and it is changed to an “x”, ie: Junta becomes Xunta.
From this I hope you will see that the name with an “x” would sound like “Don Quishote”.
… which is how we pronounce it in French, confusingly enough! 😉
“And you’re going to be going to your Burger King in Des Moines, Iowa and you’re going to have a rainbow color wrapper for your Whopper.”
Someone needs to remind Mr. Fischer that Des Moines is the state capital of Iowa…The 4th state to legalize gay marriage.
A rainbow color wrapper for your Whopper.
Nooooooooooo! Anything but that! Rat droppings – I can deal with. Cattle penned so tightly that they are standing in their own poop constantly – not a problem. Beef practically saturated in antibiotics – mmmmm! But, a rainbow color wrapper? Now you’ve gone beyond the realm of decency!
Good sir (or ma’am), I do believe you have won today’s reductio ad absurdum contest!
I’m trying to work this all in to that dialogue in Pulp Fiction….
Un McDonalds’ Royale a la arc en ciel?
… avec diamants?
Sorry, mixing up songs, I think.
They haven’t lost my business! Now I love them even more!
Lots of them probably do think it would be contaminated. An acquaintance of mine received his order at the Taco Bell drive-through from a flagrantly gay person, and he dropped the order in the nearest trash can.
Hey, if a priest mumbling some Latin over a cracker can turn it into the flesh of a 2000 year old dead guy, just imagine what a parti-colored piece of paper might do!
Poor Mr. Fischer is probably remembering the old Burger King slogan, “It takes two hands to handle a Whopper.”
LOL!
Did you ever see those men’s briefs with Home of the Whopper printed on the crotch?
Now, if only there was a vegetarian pride burger option, my gaiety would know no bounds.
I remember the last such that I tried from (IIRC) Sludge-Burger King. That was when I re-named them, and I don’t think that I’ve been back since. If they’re so keen on being inclusive to all their customers, then why don’t they actually produce something edible for their meat-free customers? Or do they really consider them to be retarded freaks, who they have to accommodate, if reluctantly?
I think my waistline can afford a rainbow Whopper or two.
It’s really as simple as it seems, isn’t it? I used to think the “fundamentals hate equality because of their homosexual urges” stance was reductive. But the older I get, and the more I experience this sort of nonsense, it seems more and more correct. I certainly understand self-loathing, but I can’t imagine loathing myself for urges over which I have no control. It’s sad–though that doesn’t mean we should cease mocking and deriding such folks.
It’s always been problematic to attribute all the hate to closeted gays, since this is an all too comfortable way to shift the responsibility to the victims. That being said, far from everyone is a 0.0 on the Kinsey scale, and I have no doubts that all the christian conservatives which aren’t might be a bit freaked out about the fact.
I agree that there’s a problematic element of blame-shifting here, and that’s precisely why I was formerly so hesitant to espouse this thinking. But I feel more and more that there’s a lot of truth to this particular idea, comfortable or not.
Memo to self : when describing things on completely arbitrary scales, I should factor thing, for example, from pi to e. Or from the fine-structure constant to c, depending on how many orders of magnitude I want. Just to emphasise the point that the scale is arbitrary. And I’d better mix greater-than directions too.
I’d bet good money that men like Fischer are constantly thinking about two guys having sex, burger or no, and whether it’s because their bigotry is that consuming or because they are repressing their own homosexuality.
I have two wishes. One is that BK expands the market of this wrapper. Two, that I would make a one-time exception to my no-beef diet to buy one. Three, that other chains get on board and materialistically compete for the pro-gay market. I guess I have three wishes.
It’s great to see the tearing down of bigotry become so mainstream that even burger joints are getting into the act…but the only way you’d get me to actually eat there would be by bribing me with donations of very large sums of money to MSF or the FFRF or some similar cause.
b&
… Fischer scoffed at the tearful reaction, and suggested that his group would try to do an “action alert” to protest to the company.
“I gotta tell you, I think this is a marketing mistake,” he said. “I think this is a bonehead move from a marketing standpoint. Because I gotta guarantee you, when people sit down to eat a hamburger, the last thing they want to be thinking about is two guys having sex.” …
Interviewer: Do you think diner’s at these restaurants might see rainbow wrappers and think about two women having sex?
Fischer: I don’t think normal god-fearing women think about other women that way.
Interviewer: Lots of heterosexual males refuse to watch gay porn and simply never fantasize about male sexual intercourse, but many of these same males are attracted to the idea of lesbians having sex, fantasize about it, and watch lesbian porn video’s.
Fischer: Those males are not true Christians. If they were, male-male sexual intercourse would be an obsession for them, like it is for me, and not that other stuff.
Interviewer: Why aren’t you also obsessed, though, by lesbian sex? Homosexual is homosexual. Aren’t you convince all homosexual acts are wrong, and not just male sex?
Fischer: Some women get confused and think they love each other the way they should love only men, but lesbian sex is a liberal mainstream media myth. Besides, lesbians do not penetrate anus’s with penis’s. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, and I think you are sick.
“…bonehead…” Heh.
“If they were, male-male sexual intercourse would be an obsession for them, like it is for me” . . . AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
That is the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks.
I have to limit my beef intake because of gout, but if my local Burger King adopts rainbow whoppers, I’ll definitely buy some. And hope some fundies are picketing the place so I can annoy them by displaying the wrappers as I walk out.
That would be by hanging the wrapper from your left rear jeans-pocket?
You might want to tuck the blue bit of the wrapper away. Unless that’s your personal thing, of course. Or your local code is different.
“…then it’s going to be spreading across the entire fruited plain…”
So predictable. Once the decidedly non-Levitical hot dog was released on the unsuspecting prairie masses, their slide into all manner of food-related ungodliness was inevitable. What’s next? Rainbow colored popsicles…Oh, wait… those bastards!
I know right? And if that wasn’t bad enough there’s the modern banana, artificially selected into a shape carefully optimized to make god-botherers uncomfortable when they peel it and poke it into their mouths.
Never look someone directly in the eye while eating a banana.
“Because I gotta guarantee you, when people sit down to eat a hamburger, the last thing they want to be thinking about is two guys having sex.”
Now, Fischer has to worry that his above words may lead some to conclude he has a certain latent tendency. It’s noteworthy that female homosexuals engaging in lovemaking apparently don’t come to his mind as he unwraps the colorfully packaged hamburger – only male homosexuals. Of course, that a gaily wrapped sandwich provokes sexual imagery of any kind at the dinner table is itself rather strange.
Fisher is a foolish human. I heard about this on the Michelangelo Signorile show on Sirius. There were some hilarious takes on the name “whopper” as being more “gay” than the rainbow paper.
Incidentally, I first heard about WEIT on this show as well, when MS was interviewing a blogger who was naming off some of his favorite blogs. Very grateful for that!
Wow, so the news has already made it more than 8 light years away 😉
Perhaps it is the whimsical, schoolboy, English side of my sense of humour, but!
The thought of Brian Fisher getting his gob around a “Whopper”, Pride wrapped or not. It makes me titter.
Titter ye not!
He’d have to suck at the whopper until it changes colour.
Benny Hill and Dick Emery would have a field day with this guy.
Get a few different coloured highlighters.
Tape them together.
Buy a whopper.
You know the rest.
“Oh NO!, They’re spreading the gay all over the fruited plain! AAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!! Not the fruited plain, whatever shall we do about all this gay being spread across the fruited plain??? Via the mechanism of greasy, junk food hamburgers no less!!! Why that’s patently un-‘Merican! What an ignorant statement! Maybe he meant like a cargo plane carrying bananas, as in a “Fruited PLANE.” Yeah, I’ll bet that’s it, I mean he couldn’t possibly be making the worst back-handed gay joke in history, could he?
You think? Nah, probably just coincidence :/
I would go to Burger King for one of those. Awesome.
Hey, that works both ways…
When I sit down to eat a chicken sandwich, the last thing I want to worry about is that some of my payment went into the pockets of fist-pumping evangelical bigots who turn around and dump unlimited amounts of cash into funding anti-civil-rights referenda.
I have mixed emotions on this issue. I love me some gay people but do we really want to see a move by corporations to add political advertising to their products? I’m legitimately wondering about that and trying to extrapolate the consequences overall. It’s not like a San Fran BK is really pushing the envelope endorsing homosexual rights. There’s no real downside for Burger King. Unless somebody can point to a longer term corporate interest by BK in securing the rights of homosexuals it looks to me like they are just ‘glamming onto” the latest trend in an attempt to sell more burgers in that market. Three, two, one….McDonalds in Denver is selling “Weed Burgers”….. Enjoy.
They are a corporation & as so, their primary motivation is to make money. I don’t have a problem with messaging. If people don’t like it, the company will know and it is up to them how they want to proceed. I would be more concerned if the messaged were state controlled.
Dude, wouldn’t Weed Burgers only be sold at like, two in the morning? And they should like totally come with Doritos instead of fries.
Only available on 4/20. Enjoy.