Honey Maid, which has provided Americans with its classic American graham crackers for well over ninety years, added to its image and redefined the word “wholesome” in its latest commercial which featured diverse families enjoying the healthy snacks. Some were black, some old, some of different faith, and Gasp! It included a gay couple sweetly playing with their new baby.
While to most mainstream Americans, this would seem pretty innocuous seeing as most of us have gay friends, co-workers, neighbors, teachers, etc. There is still that geographic elephant in the room which no one chooses to name out loud: I.E., the rural south and pockets of the Midwest where conservatism reigns supreme and many ‘regular folk’ don’t have any acquaintances beyond the standard white heterosexual Christian fried chicken eaters.
So naturally not everyone enjoyed the inclusive message the graham cracker giant was sending. Anonymous people on the interwebs can be awful — who knew?
The American Decency Association, an evangelical advocacy organization that opposes alleged pornographic and vulgar media content, is joining a new anti-gay boycott of Honey Maid graham crackers over the company’s ad.
Writes ADA’s Steve Huston:
“It’s not a matter of acceptance; it’s a matter of an evil agenda which is being pushed upon America and around the world. Satan continues to attack God’s design and skew it to his own workings. He continues to take words like “wholesome” and “family” and twist them for his own purposes. He takes a symbol of God’s promise (the rainbow) and hijacks it, twisting it to his own design. Satan calls it normal; God calls it sin. We live in a day when “evil” is called “good” and “good” is called “evil.” That which is meant to glorify God (family, the church, etc) is being taken and bent out of shape until it is hardly recognizable.”
Indeed, there do exist people who think this way in 2014 which is telling enough in and of itself but the real winner at the end of the day is Honey Maid which released what is quite possibly the best response possible to the whole ‘controversy’:
Fun thought of the day: Imagine if all the church’s millions of dollars were not spent on anti-gay propagandizing and funding of multi-million dollar lawsuits around the country and instead did something truly radical and channeled those millions toward fighting poverty, disease, and homelessness? Not to mention, the millions they do collect come (in part) from the fact that churches are tax-exempt as they are non-profit quasi-charities.
Therefore, if the churches involve themselves in purely partisan issues like opposing same-sex marriage, why is no one (and I do mean no one) asking that their tax exempt status be lifted for failing to stay non-political?