The Backlash Against a Texas Bakery Selling Rainbow Cookies Is Another Symbolic Pride Month Morality Drama

Last week, a Lufkin, Texas, bakery called Confections posted a photo of a rainbow-colored heart-shaped cookie it had made in honor of Pride month. “More LOVE. Less hate,” the bakery, owned by two sisters, wrote on its Facebook page. “Happy Pride to all our LGBTQ friends! All lovers of cookies and happiness are welcome here.”

According to the bakery, this nice if fairly anodyne message meant to both sell cookies and assert their support for LGBT rights led to quite a backlash in their small East Texas town. At least one person canceled a previously placed order and people unfollowed their social media accounts in protest—but in response, lovers of both cookies and gay rights flooded the store, and online, supporters made the small bakery go viral.

A day after their Pride-themed post, the bakery shared an update. “Today has been hard,” they wrote, adding that not only had they “lost a significant amount of followers,” but that Confections had “received a very hateful message on our business page canceling a large order” for five dozen cookies. “If you love our cookies,” they continued, “we will have an over abundance of them tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.”

And the very next day, the bakery opened its doors to a horde of customers, with a line stretching around the block. On Saturday, the bakery announced it was completely sold out of baked goods. “All this attention on our small business is very humbling,” they wrote in a Facebook post. “In the 11 years we’ve been open we’ve never seen anything quite like this.” They added that the last customers of the day, faced with empty bakery racks, had decided to donate money to some local causes.

This is a sweet, if ultimately symbolic, story. (And thus, in its own unintended way, perfect for Pride month.) But the rest of Saturday’s Facebook update made me pause a little bit. According to one of the sisters who owns the store, those customers had, with her urging, donated to… local animal rescues. “Giving it all to local animal rescues,” she wrote, adding, “We told the customers they could donate to that cause. They chose to do so.”

I love animals just as much as the next person, but wouldn’t it make sense for those donations to go to an LGBT rights organization, maybe even one in Texas that is currently fighting bills being pushed by Republicans to curtail the rights of trans Texans and their families? And especially since it was a Pride-themed cookie that kicked all of this off? A weird suggestion, I know! It’s nice to see Texans show up to make a statement in support of LGBT rights, and fuck bigots, always, but c’mon, y’all!