It only took a couple of weeks for gay rights advocates to use a recently released Cheerios commercial featuring an interracial family to equate the Gay Rights movement with the Civil Rights movement.
The Cheerios Commercial Parody
I previously wrote about the racist sentiments that some shared about the Cheerios commercial in the comments section of Youtube where the video was posted. The race-based reaction to the ad highlights the continual need for the church to address issues of race and ethnicity in the U.S.
But a video released shortly after the original commercial parodies the scene but commandeers the theme. Instead of showing an White wife, her black husband and their interracial child, the video shows a White woman, her Black partner, and their (presumably adopted) interracial daughter.
One of our RAANetwork bloggers, Tony Stone, predicted this might happen in his article, “Traditional vs. Modern Cereal.” He says, “in many minds, ‘non-heteronormative’ marriage is in the same category of multiracial families on the grounds of it breaking away from tradition. That’s a common denominator in the modern argument for gay marriage.”
In the newer video, the bi-racial child trots up to her White parent and asks if eating a healthy breakfast food like Cheerios is “normal”. And she ends her monologue with the loaded line, “And [Is it true that] in the year two thousand and thirteen the way our family looks shouldn’t be such a big deal?”
Then the woman concludes her response to the child saying, “I say that we have the God-given right to stuff our faces with whatever we want and with whomever we want. No matter what the haters say.”
The scenes cuts to the Black woman, presumably the White woman’s partner and second parent of the child, who wakes up to a chestful of Cheerios. The woman looks at the camera and says, “What? Now this is a problem? Denise! Disable the Youtube comments.”
The Cheerios commercial spoof ends with the words, “Eat it haters.” printed on the screen.
Traditional Marriage Advocate Does NOT Equal Racist
This spoof does what Cheerios didn’t, namely make an overt political statement. You can guess that the makers of the original Cheerios ad knew that featuring a mixed family would raise eyebrows, but they’re still trying to sell a product. The parody takes the same concept as the Cheerios commercial, but instead of trying to sell a breakfast food they’re selling an ideology.
The producers of the video aim to show that outrage over a mixed lesbian couple raising an interracial child is just as ridiculous and backward as the outrage some people showed over a Black man and his White wife raising their interracial child. By equating the Gay Rights movement with the Civil Rights movement, anyone who opposes homosexuality is as reprehensible as a racist.
But gay rights and civil rights for people of all races and ethnicities are not the same.
Gay Is Not the New Black
Dr. Voddie Baucham, Pastor of Grace Family Baptist Church, draws distinct lines between the gay rights movement and the civil rights movement. In his article, “Gay Is Not the New Black,” Dr. Baucham outlines three reasons why it’s a mistake to conflate gay rights and civil rights for Blacks.
I won’t rehash Dr. Baucham’s arguments here because he states his case much better than I could. But I share his post with you because whether you agree or disagree, he at least makes a case for some discontinuity between marriage equality for homosexuals and civil rights for Blacks. Read Dr. Baucham’s entire article here.
I don’t recall Dr. King saying that he dreamed his children wouldn’t be judged *either* by the color of their skin *or* the content of their character. Sexual perversion is a character issue — a very different category from race or ethnicity.