Bud Light Isn't The Issue

I noted this story just yesterday in the New York Post:

Many Target locations across the country feature massive June Pride month displays on an annual basis, with items this year ranging from “tuck friendly” bathing suits for transgender people to mugs that say “gender fluid.”

. . . A Target insider told Fox News Digital that many locations, mostly in rural areas of the South, have relocated Pride sections to avoid the kind of backlash Bud Light has received in recent weeks after using a transgender influencer in a promotional campaign.

A Target insider said there were “emergency” calls on Friday and some managers and district senior directors were told to tamp down the Pride sections immediately.

But as of the Post story yesterday, this was limited just to the places where the most bigoted rednecks lived and shopped:

Fox News Digital has confirmed rural Target stores in South Carolina, Arkansas and Georgia are among the locations to move the Pride sections. Most rank-and-file employees were left in the dark, with many not knowing the Pride sections would be moved until they noticed it themselves.

Pride merchandise remains prominently displayed at other locations and on the Target website.

But by later in the day, it wasn't just Target insiders saying things to Fox News Digital, it was the corporate spokesperson talking officially to Reuters, and the line was different:

Target has been celebrating Pride Month for more than a decade. But this year's collection has led to an increase in confrontations between customers and employees and incidents of Pride merchandise being thrown on the floor, Target spokesperson Kayla Castaneda said.

The products Target is withdrawing are being removed from all its U.S. stores and from its website, Castaneda said.

The products that have immnediately been purged are only those associated with a UK stanist designer, but others are "under review":

For example, a swimsuit sold in the women's section has come under scrutiny for the way its fit was described, as "tuck friendly," highlighted its ability to supposedly tuck male genitalia.

Predictably, California Gov Newsom weighed in:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Tuesday slammed Target’s chief executive for pulling LGBTQ and Pride Month merchandise from store shelves after facing backlash and threats of violence from some customers.

“CEO of Target Brian Cornell selling out the LGBTQ+ community to extremists is a real profile in courage. This isn’t just a couple stores in the South. There is a systematic attack on the gay community happening across the country,” Newsom wrote in a tweet Tuesday night.

Indeed, it's in Los Angeles, but it isn't "a systematic attack on the gay community". Instead, it's beginning to look like a spontaneous popular movement that radical pansexualists have brought on themselves. Their major error has been to open this phase of their campaign with a target people can pick, freeze, personalize, and polarize, figures like Dylan Mulvaney and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

San Francisco Abp Cordileone tweeted, "So we now know what gods the Dodger admin worships. Open desecration & anti-Catholicism is not disqualifying. Disappointing but not surprising. Gird your loins." In other words, this is shaping up to be a battle, but so far, it looks like the forces of pansexualism have chosen the wrong battlefield.

They're tying themselves to corporate brands, for the products of which other choices are easily available, while the brands themselves are so visible that they can't easily back out of the controversies, nor the taint their ill-considered positions, however equivocal, put on the brands themselves. This will damage the brands even if, like the Dodgers, they try to flip-flop or gaslight over what their positions actually were.

This is completely new.