Ben & Jerry's Gay Ice Cream

Mixing politics with marketing is always fraught with peril, but that didn't stop Ben & Jerry's from temporarily changing the name of its Chubby Hubby ice cream to Hubby Hubby in honor of gay marriage becoming legal today in Vermont, home of the ice cream maker.

The rebranded ice cream won't be widely distributed but will be handed out from a truck decked out with a wedding theme and sold in sundae form in the company's six Vermont stores.

Nonetheless, the move has brought out the Internet crazies. The comments section on the Boston Herald's article is, of course, full of all kinds of nasty, semiliterate stuff written by anonymous keyboard warriors. Since the product contains fudge and is packed into pints, you can guess where a lot of these commenters decided to take the "discussion."

But there's crazy coming from the left as well. A friend of mine posted a link to the Herald article on Facebook, only to have someone come in and stomp all over his joy with shrill references to the Unilever (UN)-owned Ben & Jerry's abuse of animals, its environmental sins, and its peddling of unhealthy food. Ice cream? Unhealthy? Well, now I know.

The Herald reports that the move is "mostly symbolic" but that the company might end up marketing Hubby Hubby more widely in the future.

Despite the controversy, it seems unlikely that sales will be hurt. Most of the people who choose their ice cream brands based on politics decided long ago whether to consume Ben & Jerry's—a brand that is (to repurpose a Simpsons reference to Snapple) "made by hippies and distributed by a heartless multinational corporation."

As noted by "pmancusi" in the Herald comments, "I stopped eating their ice cream because it is horrible and made by smelly Left Wingers."

But Brian Camenker of the insane Web site MassResistance.org, who seems like a fun guy, told the Herald: "It’s a bad idea, especially because I think they’re just doing it to rub it in that Vermont has legalized gay marriage."

The article, it should be noted, was published in the Business section. Leave it to the Herald to always seek out the most thoughtful, knowledgeable sources.