I read today that a So-Cal TV station refused to air a new ad. As Tips-Q has it: “The ABC affiliate reportedly said the ad – featuring two black men who are raising five children – was too controversial to air during the inauguration, when ‘many families will be watching’.”
I went to the KABC-TV website and filled in their comment form with the following:
Dears Sirs & Madams:
I read the news today that KABC refused to air an ad that featured an African-American family headed by a gay male couple. I am disgusted that your station is colluding with the enemies of civil rights to prevent the achievement of equality & justice in this state. The ad you refused to show is only controversial because you & your anti-gay agenda need to hide images of authentic gay people living boring, ordinary lives in order to prop up the fantasy image of us as weird, non-normal freaks. You will only succeed by lying and lying and lying. Prop 8 passed only because of a Yes campaign based on lies, a campaign, it seems evident now, that you materially assisted. It is pathetic and egregious that you, who squat on the public airwaves, are censoring the truth and backing up the lie.
sincerely,
Glenn Ingersoll
I first saw the ad (& a few others) in a diary at DailyKos. As Nazakhstan, the diarist, said, “I was very disappointed in the lack of actual gay people in the No on Prop 8 campaign ads. I have attended town hall meetings in the Sacramento area and the Bay Area and this theme keeps coming up over and over again... where were the gay families?”
The excuse the No on 8 campaign used for hiding gay families was that their focus groups told them they found gay families yucky and weird and actually looking at them made them less likely to vote in a friendly way. My DailyKos handle is LuvSet. I left this comment:
“These ads look good, they have a positive message, and they treat the participants & the viewers with respect. Wow. … If I'd seen this sort of ad proposed in spring of last year I would have been much more confident about the value being gotten from my contributions because, no matter the outcome of a particular election, these messages make progress.”
The ads were produced by Get to Know Us First, a group that formed “in the wake of California’s passage of Proposition 8.” Five ads/public service announcements are posted on the Get to Know Us First homepage.
2 comments:
The one thing that dissolves prejudice is actual encounters: once a white man actually befriends a black man, everything inside his head changes, and once a straight man befriends a gay man, everything changes as well.
We are so much more alike than otherwise, it should be obvious.
But the cure, I think, is not public videos but private connections, personal relationships. Nothing so banishes prejudice as that.
I thought Prop. 8 an anachronisistic joke; I was shocked when it actually passed! Perhaps this age is still darker than I knew.
CE
Sadly, "everything" doesn't change, even with personal connection. But much can change, more than I tend to acknowledge.
Aspirin is not a cure for heart attacks, I'm told, but a small dose taken daily can reduce the likelihood. This is why the Religious Control Freaks try to shut out depictions of activities they don't like. They are afraid of normalization. 30 second TV ads are better than nothing. Not good to thrive on heart attacks.
I expected Prop 8 to pass because these sorts of propositions have come up for a vote again and again and again and each time they pass -- usually by a 2 to 1 margin. That was true with the earlier Prop 22 which did the same thing as 8, only wasn't a Constitutional amendment. I threw money into the anti-8 campaign because I didn't want it to pass, not because I figured I was betting on a win. Even though what came did not surprise, it still hurt. A lot.
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