How do you spell clueless?
The owner of a BBQ truck in Kentucky is facing some heat after he advertised t-shirts on Facebook promoting his distasteful revision of the LGBTQ acronym.
Jamie Smith, the owner of Belle’s Smoking BBQ, decided to make fun of the acronym commonly used to refer to people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.
“I support LGBTQ: Liberty, Guns, Bible, Trump, BBQ,” his garish garments declare.
Smith has been driving his BBQ truck across the state for the last three years and started selling the shirts two years ago. Last week, he decided to advertise the appalling apparel on Facebook.
It worked. The shirt sold out quickly, and he’s currently on back order. But not everybody is laughing with him.
“I posted the shirt today for new swag and it just went out of hand and it got blowed up,” Smith told Fox19.
The Louisville Fairness Campaign, a group that fights LGBTQ discrimination shared the post on its Facebook page, and comments condemning the “bigotry” spread fast.
Chris Hartman, the organization’s executive director, told the Louisville Courier Journal that he’d never seen a post on its page go viral so quickly.
After hundreds of messages condemning Smith’s play on words, Belle’s Smoking BBQ removed the post and replaced it with an apology to “groups, organizations or individuals” who were offended by the shirts.
The apology also noted that “we are hurt that the people that are saying, ‘stop the hate’ are the ones coming at us with the harassing messages and threatening phone calls.”
Hurt or not, Smith said he has no plans to stop selling the shirts. More shirts are on the way, and orders keep coming in from all over the country.
The controversy did cost cost him some business. Trinity Episcopal Church said Belle’s Smoking BBQ was no longer welcome as one of the vendors at next month’s Sprouts and Stouts Festival. But it also gave him four new jobs, Smith said.
