Local Newswire Hamburger Mary’s sticks it to Chick-Fil-A with “hate-free” chicken sandwich

In a world of lightning-fast social media and increasingly short attention spans, it’s hard to keep track of the latest outrage. Whether it’s magazine covers depicting breast-feeding, celebrated authors making up quotes, or television networks botching the Olympics, it seems that Americans are living in a perpetual, constantly updated state of pissed-off-ness. So it’s refreshing to see a business take an interest in a scandal that may have already fallen off many folks’ collective radar. Hamburger Mary’s—an LGBT-friendly restaurant chain with locations in Milwaukee and Chicago—is doing just that by looking all the way back to last month and sticking it to decidedly LGBT-unfriendly Chick-Fil-A.

The owners of the Milwaukee and Chicago Hamburger Mary’s franchises, twin brothers Ashley and Brandon Wright, have announced that the August burger-of-the-month will be a “hate-free” southern-style chicken sandwich. The sandwich is being billed as an alternative to Chick-Fil-A, whose CEO, Dan Cathy, caused an uproar after voicing his Biblical opposition to gay marriage. “We wanted to create our own southern-style chicken sandwich, made from free-range and ‘hate-free’ chickens,” says Ashley Wright in a press release. “We’ve developed a recipe that is pretty darn good, and this is the perfect opportunity to launch it.”

A portion of the sales of the sandwich will be donated to charities nationwide. The Milwaukee location of Hamburger Mary’s —which opened in 2011—will donate to Equality Wisconsin, an organization that aims to “improve the quality of life of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Wisconsin by winning concrete legislative victories that establish equal rights under the law.”