"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
After the recent gay-marriage victories in Iowa and Vermont, a mysterious new conservative group called the National Organization for Marriage released an apocalyptic TV commercial, "There's a Storm Gathering," which alleged that gay-rights initiatives are taking away Christians' religious freedom. Now, I could write a serious blog post about the contradictions of invoking the liberal-pluralist language of individual rights and tolerance to defend religiously motivated restrictions on gays' civil rights. And maybe I will soon. But the parodies of the NOM video that have sprung up all over the web offer a more memorable rebuttal than I ever could.
First prize goes to The Colbert Report's spot from Thursday night. Noting that New York's Gov. David Paterson has introduced a same-sex marriage bill, our favorite mock-conservative mourns for "the good old days when our governor upheld the traditional definition of marriage as being between a man, a woman, and an Emperor's Club hooker." There's a great gay storm gathering, and "pretty soon the winds will be blowing each other."
The characters in Zane Johnsen's spoof ad speculate on what will happen when a nice hetero family sees gay couples on TV: "It is like a flood in the living room and the whole family is being washed away by the wiles of Satan and his dark army of homos...Peter begins playing with Molly's dolls...Your wife leaves the house a mess and goes back to college..."
This more serious ad from GoodAsYou.org debunks the factual claims of the original. "There's a bullshit storm gathering." Indeed.
And for sheer creativity, as well as some adorable visuals, the prize goes to this ad sponsored by The National Association of Organizations Against Cat(s) Licking Each Other(s) Organizations Committee (NSOACLEOOC).
Thinking of creating your own video for marriage equality? Enter it in Project Pushback's contest before May 18 and you could win $2,500. Project Pushback is an initiative of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center.
