The ultra-conservative, anti-LGTBQ organization One Million Moms has struck again, this time because Oreo dared to depict parents who accept their queer children.
Oreo released a new ad featuring a young lesbian couple who makes a "meet the parents"-style visit home that starts out bumpy but ends with both parents accepting the couple. As a result, One Million Moms threatened to boycott the cookie company for "going after our children."
It seems One Million Moms would prefer an alternate ending where the parents in the ad kick their daughter and her girlfriend out of the house and never speak to them again, or something.
The ad, titled "OREO Proud Parent" and created in collaboration with LGBTQ-advocacy organization PFLAG (Parents, Friends and Families of Lesbians and Gays), depicts a scenario all too common for LGBTQ people.
During a visit to her parents' house, a young woman and her girlfriend find her mother readily accepts them, but her father keeps his distance, seemingly uncomfortable. In the end, the father bridges the gap by painting the fence in front of their home in the colors of the rainbow.
The ad ends with the words:
"A loving world starts with a loving home."
The parents in the ad are an interracial couple. The 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia made interracial marriage legal throughout the United States.
The symbolism was not lost on people familiar with the long fight for marriage equality for all.
One Million Moms—which has long been rumored to be composed of only one woman, anti-LGBTQ activist Monica Cole and has only about 100,000 Facebook fans and 4,800 Twitter followers—released a statement asserting the ad amounts to an attempt to "brainwash" children.
"Oreo and parent company, Mondelez International... [are] attempting to normalize the LGBTQ lifestyle by using their commercials, such as the most recent Oreo ad featuring a lesbian couple, to brainwash children and adults alike by desensitizing audiences."
One Million Moms then called upon Christians to boycott Oreo and all of Mondelez's many diverse brands, threatening damage to the company's bottom line.
"Supporting the homosexual agenda versus remaining neutral in the cultural war is just bad business."
Analysis by experts like the Harvard Business Review, however, concluded the opposite, showing supporting LGBTQ equality boosts the economy in myriad ways.
Perhaps that's why, with few exceptions, brands tend to ignore Monica Cole's repeated outcries.
On Twitter, people were not falling for Cole's antics.
One Million Moms is affiliated with Evangelical Christian organization the American Family Association, which advocates for so-called "conversion therapy" for homosexuals.
The United Nations has deemed the practice "torture," and it has been outlawed in numerous countries around the world.
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