Burger King Just Threw Shade At Chick-Fil-A With This Donation Pledge

With its latest marketing move, Burger King has brought further attention to the recent story of Chick-fil-A's connections with anti-LGBTQ charities. While Burger King did not name Chick-fil-A outright — and so can deny throwing any shade — it seems probable that the burger chain meant to do exactly this.

The promotion in question, as USA Today reports, is that Burger King has promised to donate 40 cents for every Ch'King sandwich sold during Pride month to the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, until they have hit $250,000. In the announcing tweet, Burger King emphasized in parentheses that they would make these donations "even on Sundays" with an accompanying side-eye emoji, in what could be seen as a veiled reference to Chick-fil-A. That's because Chick-fil-A is famous for not operating on Sundays and has recently been in the news due to the indirect donations that went from CEO Dan Cathy to the National Christian Charitable Foundation, an organization that donates to members of Congress who are currently striving to stall the passage of the Equality Act (via The Daily Beast). If the act were to pass, it would outlaw discrimination based on one's sexual orientation or gender identity.

While the donations network uncovered by The Daily Beast was both secret and complex enough to warrant a full-scale investigation, many people had incorrectly assumed that Chick-fil-A had ceased to give aid to anti-LGBTQ organizations in 2019 after a series of setbacks abroad and a public pressure campaign at home (via USA Today).

However, in a fact check Snopes conducted at the time, the real truth tried to emerge. Namely, Chick-fil-A had conducted a reorganization of its general donation practices, not an ideological trimming. The company will give to any groups, it said, "as long as they are highly effective in areas of hunger, homelessness and education." Now, CEO Dan Cathy does not donate Chick-fil-A's money but rather his own, but Snopes pointed out that the chain has never made an explicit disavowal of anti-LGBTQ groups. It has also never promised to stop donating to them at a future date.

What the Daily Beast article and Burger King did was to lead eyeballs towards the fact that everyone assumed a bigger change had occurred than the one that actually did.