From Yahoo News:
Whole Foods is using security footage to sue a gay pastor for an unlikely reasonBusiness Insider By Hayley Peterson
Whole Foods is suing a pastor who claimed that the grocery chain sold him a cake decorated with a homophobic slur.
Jordan Brown, an openly gay pastor at Austin’s Church of Open Doors, posted a video last week claiming that the cake he bought at Whole Foods was decorated with the words "Love Wins F—."
“When I got into my vehicle, I looked inside and saw they had wrote ‘Love Wins F–’ on it,” Brown said in the video. “You can see it nice and clear. Also, it is still in a sealed box. As you see, I have not opened up this box yet.”
The video went viral online and he filed a lawsuit alleging intentional infliction of emotional distress.
“Pastor Jordan spent the remainder of the day in tears,” the suit reads. “The potential for racial, sexual, religious, and anti-LGBT slurs to be written on personalized cakes is high, and Whole Foods knew or should have known that slurs or harassing messages could be written on cakes and then presented to a customer without any oversight or prior warning.”
But Whole Foods claims in a countersuit that its employees didn’t write the slur on the cake, the Statesman reports.….
The suit claims Brown “intentionally, knowingly and falsely accused Whole Foods and its employees of writing the homophobic slur … on a custom made cake that he ordered from WFM’s Lamar Store in Austin.”
The company also released a statement saying it reviewed security footage and determined that Brown had tampered with the cake.
Busted!
Orwell’s version of what later came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis emphasizes that human beings are better at noticing patterns for which they have been told names. The term “hate hoax” is a catchy name for a common pattern of events that have taken up a lot of space in the media since, say, Al Sharpton promoted Tawana Brawley’s hoax in 1987, but the term “hate hoax” isn’t really a thing you are supposed to know. So, the media is constantly surprised by each dreary repetition of hate hoaxes.
