Be sure to click through each window of this ad — it keeps going after you think it’s over, and you have to see the whole thing. Granted, there are a couple of crudely funny moments, but that doesn’t stop it from taking its place as the most loathesome example of GOP anti-gay bigotry to date.
There were a couple moments that made me think of the hilarious bush-Blair “Endless Love” video, which was truly funny and was not at all cruel. This ad, however, goes way too far, and its message is one of pure hatred and fear.
Update: Andrew Sullivan posts this email he just received in regard to the link above:
“I forwarded the anti-Kerry anti-gay ad posted on your site to my few gay Republican friends. No caption. No commentary. Today a friend who is a Bush supporter called me. Direct quote: “I’m voting for Kerry.” When I asked why she said: ‘Bush doesn’t scare me but the people who support and defend him do.”
1
By vaara
Um… was that supposed to make me *hate* John Kerry?
Au contraire! (as Kerry himself would say.)
October 23, 2004 @ 11:40 am | Comment
2
By richard
Well, you and i can see it that way. Unfortunately, there are many rednecks who will see it as proof of Kerry’s depravity, and not the depravity of its makers.
October 23, 2004 @ 2:39 pm | Comment
3
By vaara
There’s merchandise, too!
October 23, 2004 @ 2:46 pm | Comment
4
By richard
About gay Republicans, I hate to say it Vaara, but you are completely right. All the ones I know are rich and spoiled, and also racist. Generalities and stereotypes are always risky, but this is simply something I observed first-hand. I was invited to a party back in New York (more years ago than I’ll ever tell you) held by one of my few Republican friends. I brought with me a good friend of mine, a black fellow. Afterwards, I got severely scolded by my host, who said — and I’ll never forget it — “We don’t socialize with people who came to America in chains.” I never talked to him again.
October 23, 2004 @ 5:00 pm | Comment
5
By ACB
Richard
While I might support you on a lot of things, you need to accept that the freedom that you have been granted in America works both ways. You have the freedom to love and the freedom to hate.
Just as pro homosexual groups have the right to lobby for gay marrage so anti homosexual groups have the right to lobby against it. This is called freedom of speach and freedom of association, if you remove it for one side you must remove it from both sides.
The first chain forged must chain all or chain none, this is equallity as enshrined in the constitution, just as the first chain broken must be broken for all.
There are people out here who don’t like gay marriage, they’re not all ‘queer bashers’ and they are not all fundamentalists or bigots. They simply dislike the idea or feel that marriage means a man and a woman, and that if you want to do something else then you shouldn’t try to alter what we have, but rather recognise a same sex union as being different.
The advert doesn’t call for violence, at least the little that I watched didn’t, and it didn’t have all that much hate in it, it is a political statement just as showing pictures of mained people in the Iraq war is.
You don’t support poligamy, or other similar unions that fall out of the two adults brackets, this makes you as bad as anti-homosexual groups, at least by your own agrument that people have the right to show love in the way that they want with the person that they want, and that marriage should be about love and not restricted to basic male-female unions.
Well except the anti-homosexual fascists who go out there and start pummeling people. They have no excuses and are just violent hatemongers.
I shall be waiting for you to support widening the barackets of marriage to one man and two women, after all if they love each other and want to be together, why shouldn’t they have exactly the same rights that you want for homosexual.
October 24, 2004 @ 12:54 am | Comment
6
By vaara
“There are people out here who don’t like gay marriage, they’re not all ‘queer bashers’ and they are not all fundamentalists or bigots.”
But that ad clearly IS motivated by hatred and bigotry. For one thing, where are the lesbian couples? Fundamentalists know that male/male couplings are far more repellent to the average Moron-American than lesbian ones are, so that’s why they cherry-pick images of the most outrageous-looking male couples they can find.
And what are we supposed to make of the “Kerry is a Fairy” t-shirts anyway? Just laugh it off as a bit of harmless post-modern irony? I think not.
October 24, 2004 @ 1:53 am | Comment
7
By Harry Hutton
How are you going to vote, Richard? It’s time you came off the fence.
October 24, 2004 @ 10:32 am | Comment
8
By Devi
What a closet case! What kind of true heterosexual man sits down and spends hours finding pictures of John Edwards looking pretty, and putting “sparklies” in his eyes?
October 24, 2004 @ 10:37 am | Comment
9
By Devi
This is called freedom of speach and freedom of association
There’s yet another kind of freedom. It’s called “The freedom to post this everywhere and get people to hit it several times a day, sending a HUGE bandwidth bill to its creator.” At 1.3MB, that won’t take too long if we all join together and make an effort.
October 24, 2004 @ 10:43 am | Comment
10
By richard
ACB — What Vaara said. Plus, it’s my freedom to call this sort of thing depraved. I don’t think there’s any justification for institutionalized bigotry. Do the bigots have a right to say it? Sure, and people have the right to call for legalized sex with children and anything else you can think of. But it’s plain wrong and I have to call them on it. Your arguments equating polygamy with homosexuality, something over which the person has virtually no choice, simply won’t wash and has been rejected by all but the far right. People aren’t born polygamists.
Devi, you’re probably right. The macho men who brought us this ad are probably cross-dressers. Harry, I’m keeping it a secret for now who I’m going to endorse. But you’re free to make a guess.
October 24, 2004 @ 10:48 am | Comment
11
By The Taipei Kid
OK, let me be sure I’ve got this straight. When straight people get married in cheap Las Vegas ceremonies or underwater wearing wet suits, that is cute and unique, but when gay men marry in leather, that’s bad.
October 25, 2004 @ 3:43 am | Comment
12
By The Taipei Kid
P.S. Do they have the copyright to use that song?
October 25, 2004 @ 3:45 am | Comment
13
By richard
Good points, Taipei. And for all those who are so obsessed with the “sanctity of mariage,” why don’t you put your money where your mouth is and stop getting divorced?
And no, I’m sure the sleazeballs did ignored the copyright on the song.
October 25, 2004 @ 9:14 am | Comment