Ken Bellingham, who’s owned the Edmonds Bakery in Edmonds for 26 years, says the cookie was a treat for his daughter-in-law and he initially had no plans to sell the cookie. “The cookie just got put out there and somebody thought that I was selling them,” Bellingham told KCPQ[1]. “It was part of my collection.”
Then a customer snapped a photo of the cookie and posted about it in a Facebook group.
“It’s hard to see words like that,” Ana Carrera told KING[2]. “We were born here, but my parents were the stories you see on the news of people crossing the border because they just want a new start.” Carrera said her parents came to the United States from Mexico in the 1980s.
Faced with a backlash from the local community, Bellingham initially apologized.
“I will not be making anymore cookies of a political nature, but a narrow line of Love and Sweetheart and maybe Nice Butt,” he wrote Tuesday on the company’s Facebook page.
But by Thursday, Bellingham had had a change of heart, citing the First Amendment protection of free speech and urging people to “lighten up.”
“Am I supposed to be quiet because I can’t write what I want, or I can only write what they want or makes them happy? No. That’s not how it is,” Bellingham told KOMO[3]. “They can write whatever they want on their own cookie and I can do that on mine.”
Bellingham said he does support border security but would not go as far as to say he supported a wall. In the end, he said selling the “Build the Wall” cookies was a business decision. “The phone messages saved has like 40-or-50 messages that I can’t even respond to from people all over the country wanting me to ship them cookies,” said Bellingham.”
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