“We have been very pleased with the lines since opening Oct. 10 and are grateful for customer response to our food and our approach to customer service,” the company said in an email Saturday, including photos of customers waiting in line. “We mutually agreed to a six-month lease with the Oracle Mall in Reading as part of a longer term strategy for us as we look to expand our international presence.”

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Reading Pride, a U.K.-based LGBTQ advocacy group, announced its stance against the restaurant’s opening Oct. 14. In a statement shared on Twitter, the group said it was “staunchly opposed to Chick-fil-A setting up shop in the UK and certainly in Reading.”

“The chain’s ethos and moral stance goes completely against our values, and that of the UK as we are a progressive country that has legalized same-sex marriage for some years, and continues to strive towards equality,” the statement said.

The group cited infamous comments Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy made in 2012 about believing in the “biblical definition of the family unit.” It also pointed to the company’s donations to organizations such as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which says in its statement of faith that marriage is “exclusively the union of one man and one woman.”

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Chick-fil-A has defended its giving, telling Business Insider that the money given to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes funds camps its foundation has hosted through a partnership with the organization.

“These kids are important to us,” Rodney Bullard, the company’s vice president of corporate social responsibility, told Business Insider. “We develop relationships with them over the years to where there is a crisis, they actually come to people, in part to people in our staff.”

Protests of the U.K. location continued Saturday even as news spread that the location would close. In videos shared on social media, activists waved rainbow flags and used a microphone to announce that Chick-fil-A is “not welcome here.”

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“You may be closing down six months’ time, but we have a message for you,” one man said. “You will not be opening anywhere else in the U.K. And if we do see you on our soil, we will stand up and we will challenge you again.”