Louisiana farmer promotion of Sacred Heart over Pride Month costs business, rallies fellow Catholics

Louisiana farmer's promotion of Sacred Heart over Pride Month costs business, but rallies fellow Catholics' support

By Maria Wiering, OSV News

(OSV News) -- Ross McKnight's Instagram is full of ducks, geese and other images from his southeastern Louisiana farm, behind-the-scenes snapshots into what it takes to run his family's foie gras business, Backwater Foie Gras. On June 10, he posted an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus over the words "Dieu le Roi": "God the King."

It's his devotion to the Sacred Heart, and the Catholic faith that undergirds it, that has cost his business dearly.

On June 2, under a photo of McKnight and a horse, he wrote a post that, without explicitly naming it, spurned LGBTQ+ Pride Month. "The attempted coup of the month of June'' in Louisiana only makes sense, he said, as an attack "by an ever-encroaching enemy that has sought for generations to destroy our unique culture which is so intimately tied to our Catholic identity."

He suggested "antidotes to a false pride," including enthroning the Sacred Heart in one's home, wearing the Sacred Heart badge and praying the rosary in French. "For God and the King!" he wrote, both in English and French.

Within a couple of days, restaurants representing Backwater Foie Gras' two largest summer contracts texted McKnight to cancel their order, making clear it was because of McKnight's rejection of LGBTQ+ pride. One of the customers had a long-standing relationship with the farm. The canceled orders represented about $6,000 per month for the summer, when the farm bridges the gap between foie gras-producing seasons by supplying fresh chicken and duck meat.

"The natural reaction is, 'Oh no, I may not recover from this,' because it was huge and immediate," McKnight, 32, told OSV News. "In those moments that day and the following day where it was just madness and those deep, deep feelings of distress. … You're just going through all of those emotions of 'What have I done?' … I know intellectually God is going to take care of me, but right now (when it happened), holy smokes, it feels terrible."

He has not publicly named the restaurants that withdrew their orders, and in a June 15 Instagram reel, he said he was not likely to.

Despite the fallout, McKnight does not think he acted rashly. "I am not in any way regretful of having said what I said," he said. "I'm very glad to have been, in that moment, able to promote the Sacred Heart and to speak against Pride Month."

"In the post, I was talking about the problem of … Americanization being sort of shoved down the throats of we 'Louisianais.' We're Louisiana Catholics, we have certain values," he said. "And we're being forced to accept these things in order just to operate."


Backwater Foie Gras customers, Catholic friends and Catholic restaurateurs have stepped forward to buy more products or donate funds to the family, he said.

"God took care of us through our friends, through the Catholic community, through people that love the Lord," he said. "I feel like I stepped off a cliff, but without looking down, God's just been building a bridge out of nothing underneath my feet."

The husband and father of five does not regret the June 2 post, he said. Standing up for the Catholic faith and promoting a Catholic worldview, especially in southern Louisiana, honors the sacrifice his ancestors made in France for the Catholic faith, he said. He deeply respects his forebearers for "seeking to preserve tradition, seeking to preserve culture, seeking to preserve the faith and taking the very difficult steps to do that."

"We just know that these roots are deep and we have no right, I suppose, not to continue to fight the same battle," he said.

The church dedicates the month of June to the Sacred Heart, with the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart celebrated on the Friday following Corpus Christi, June 16 this year. The devotion began after St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647–1690), a French Visitation nun and mystic, received private revelations from Christ asking her to promote devotion to his Sacred Heart for the reparation of sin. The devotion spread and in 1856, its feast was extended to the entire church.

McKnight said he believes what the church teaches about same-sex attraction, and that his rejection of the "false pride" of Pride Month is not a stance against individuals, but against a movement he sees as an attack on speaking truth and on God's plan for the family. He also sees the promotion of the pride movement in historically Catholic regions of Louisiana as an outside assault on the Catholic faith and the state's heritage.

To redirect attention to the Sacred Heart, he has placed a sign on his farmers' market stand that reads "celebrate humility" with an image of the Sacred Heart.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart expresses Christ as king, McKnight said. "Not only is he the spiritual king, right, but he's the literal, physical king of heaven and earth. He's a man, he has a body. He is the heir of King David, and he will come physically to restore his kingdom in the new heaven and the new earth."

McKnight's devotion also ties him to his ancestors, as the image of the Sacred Heart was worn by Catholic counter-revolutionaries during the French Revolution.

Backwater Foie Gras is one of only a handful of U.S. producers of the delicacy, the fattened liver of ducks and geese, and, to McKnight's knowledge, it may be the only artisanal foie gras producer in Louisiana. When the idea came, McKnight said he felt a responsibility to make it happen. He had been a financial adviser but health crises made it impossible to work for about a year. The situation motivated him to realize his dream of farming, and with his parents and French friends, he launched Backwater Foie Gras in 2019.

In a June 9 Instagram post, McKnight wrote about the situation and expressed gratitude for those who have supported the farm.

"While we've never required our customers to pass a litmus test before serving them, it seems our values, which come from lives lived as Louisiana Catholics, are considered unacceptable by some," he wrote. He described how people have come to the family's aid, adding, "This is to say: the glory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus will grow and be established throughout the world no matter the obstacle, and God cares for our well-being."