A South Carolina teenager was forced into having an embarrassing conversation with his friends and loved ones after a local Publix grocery store where his mom ordered him a graduation cake decided to arbitrarily censor its congratulatory wording, ignorantly believing it to be profanity.
Jacob Koscinski, a home-schooler who recently graduated from high school, achieved an impressive 4.89 grade point average (GPA), which means he graduated with highest honors. And there's a term for this in Latin, Summa Cum Laude, that's commonly used to describe students like Jacob who excel academically above their peers.
But when Jacob's mother filled out the text form on the Publix website asking that her son's cake bear an inscription with this Latin honor phrase, the grocery chain edited out the middle word. Because this word is sometimes used to describe male reproductive fluid in English slang, Publix decided to remove and replace it with three dashes.
The grocery store didn't notify the Koscinski family, however. Instead, Jacob's mother reportedly took the cake home and opened it, only to discover that the edible inscription she requested had been altered by the Publix censor police, which obviously have no idea what Summa Cum Laude means in academic terms.
"He did not know we were getting a cake because he's not a big cake eater," stated Jacob's mom Cara to local media. "So we were all standing there waiting to see it and when we opened it, it was a huge shock to all of us."
"The website had censored me and this is a website that you can refer to for the Latin term for Summa Cum Laude which means highest honors," she added.
Since many of Jacob's family members didn't understand why the middle word of this term was removed, he had no choice but to explain it to them.
"The cake experience was kind of frustrating and humiliating because I had to explain to my friends and family ... what that meant," Jacob stated. "And they were giggling uncontrollably. At least my friends were."
After notifying the Publix store in question, located on Savannah Highway and Main Road, Cara was offered an apology and a full refund by the manager.
"It's fine for us to be compensated for the cake," Cara added in a statement to the media. "We're just happy that our son graduated school and has a bright future.
Publix routinely plays morality police while hypocritically working with Big Pharma to keep cannabis illegal
This is the same Publix grocery store chain, of course, that spent nearly a million dollars trying to overturn medical cannabis legalization in the state of Florida, where voters overwhelmingly indicated that they no longer want to be prosecuted and jailed for using a plant.
Publix heiress Carol Jenkins Barnett, daughter of Publix founder George W. Jenkins, personally donated $800,000 to the anti-legalization group "Drug Free Florida," which spent its own organizational fortune trying to keep prohibition in place throughout the Sunshine State.
Since the company profits heavily from the pharmacies that are part of every one of its grocery stores, Publix recognized cannabis legalization as a threat to this cash windfall. As a result, Publix lobbied heavily to keep cannabis illegal in Florida, even as it plays the morality police in other areas such as magazine censor in the checkout line and cake wording censor in the bakery.
Keep in mind that Publix has direct ties to both the Florida Medical Association (FMA) and PhRMA, which are aggressively anti-cannabis and pro-pharmaceutical. The FMA in particular, as explained in a report published by the Miami New Times, has an entire lobbying wing dedicated to "Pharmaceutical Corporate Affairs" that basically works to keep pharmaceuticals as the only available medicine to Americans.
Read Banned.news for more examples of speech that's being banned in modern society.
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