Awesome response

Honey Maid launched an ad campaign called “This Is Wholesome”. One commercial in the series included two gay dads. Wingnuts’ heads exploded—and now Honey Maid has responded with the video above.

The original commercial (below) was pretty good as a positive, feel-good ad, treating gay families as another form of family, so I could easily guess what Nabisco, the maker of Honey Maid, would be in for. The radical right didn’t disappoint me: They demanded that their fellow bigots bombard Nabisco with messages, and the bigots obliged. But in the video response from Honey Maid, they say the supportive and positive messages they received outnumbered the bad ones ten times over. THAT is awesome.

I’ve said repeatedly that love always defeats hate, but sometimes it takes a long time to do so. In this case, at least, we’ve seen it happen much faster. Which is why the response above appeals to me so much: Symbolically turning hate into love.

The fact that some people still become enraged at depictions of gay families shows how far we still have to go. I bet they also got hate mail because of their interracial couple, too, though I suspect not nearly as many as about the current obsession of the far right, LGBT people. This may be the 21st century, but that doesn’t mean that hatred and bigotry have gone away—YET. The positive outcome this time helps rekindle my fires of hope for a while longer.

The ad that started all this:



New Zealand readers can buy Honey Maid Graham Crackers from Martha’s Backyard in Auckland.