The Religious Right Hated on Honey Maid and Honey Maid Returned Their Hate with Love

Honey_Maid_Wholesome
So, have you seen Honey Maid’s new gay-inclusive ad? If not, take a look:

The American Family Association has. Their subsidiary, hopelessly optimistically-named One Million Moms, has organized a boycott. One Million Moms said in a statement that Honey Maid and Nabisco “should be ashamed of themselves” for trying to “normalize sin.”

Because, hate, you know, is so much more normal.

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The so-called American Decency Association, who has also seen the video and they have decided that Satan is responsible for the ad. What other explanation is possible when you attach the word “wholesome” to a gay couple? Says Steve Huston of the ADA:

With Nabisco, Coca-Cola, Chevrolet and the plethora of advertisers out there trying to make homosexuality look normal and wholesome, you’d think that this issue has become a cultural wave that has taken in a very large percentage of the population.

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 with his own workings. He continues to take words like “wholesome” and “family” and twist them for his own purposes.

Satan, he concludes, “wants us to see sin as normal and not so bad.”

And Huston wants us to see Satan, an evil being Judaism does not even recognize, as real.

He might be right. Look what people like him have done to Jesus’ teachings about turning the other cheek and not casting the first stone. Look how people like him have put a white hat on the enemy in Jesus’ teachings, the rich, and put a black hat on the people Jesus blessed, the poor.

Honey Maid had an answer for their bigoted critics. It took all the hateful comments and turned them, literally, into love:

Honey_Maid_Love

Which brings us to Steve Malzberg from NewsMax. Malzberg has a slightly different take than Huston, saying that Honey Maid may be making gay people happy but at the same time are “incurring the wrath” of the other “95 percent of the population” who are straight.

I don’t know how wholesome it is. It’s a company decision and now they are going to have to live with it. If they’re looking to appeal to the 5 percent of the population that’s gay, good for them, but you do so possibly at the expense of some of the other 95 percent of the population and incurring their wrath.

But Malzberg is wrong. It isn’t 5 percent of the population that’s gay, but more like 20 percent, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. And then there are the recent polls that show that show that 52 percent of Americans now support legalizing gay marriage. I don’t think Honey Maid and Nabisco need worry much about their bigoted critics. There aren’t enough of them to do a company harm.

I mean, think about it. One Million Moms has 64,740 likes on Facebook, a fair deficit short of one million. This liberal website, by contrast, has 204,000 likes. I would suggest that people like Malzberg need to recompute their sums. I understand not liking an answer, but math is pretty simple in concept, and you don’t get to ignore numbers you don’t like.

Finally, we come to Charisma News editor Jennifer LeClaire, who, sounding like a spokesperson for former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, says Honey Maid is “trying to shove something down my throat for which I have no taste.” She wrote in a column Wednesday that she would “pray for those whose hand may be caught in the cookie jar of sexual immorality when Jesus returns.”

She wasn’t impressed with Honey Maid’s elegant smackdown of haters either, compaining that the company hired two “lesbians [to] glue together the complaints to spell out the word ‘love’ in cursive.”

Nabisco’s brand is no longer wholesome. The makers of favorites like Nilla Wafers and Teddy Grahams is propagating same-sex marriage – complete with newborn babies – in its latest 30-second commercial. Dubbed “This is wholesome,” the agenda is indeed anything but.

“Wholesome?” she asks.

Maybe Nabisco is using a different dictionary than the rest of us. Merriam-Webster defines wholesome as “promoting health or well-being of mind or spirit” and “sound in body, mind, or morals.” By either definition, Nabisco got it wrong.

She has yet to explain how hating Money Maid is following Jesus’ injunction to love her enemies, turn the other cheek, and to treat others how you would expect to be treated. Instead, she pretends hate is love and ignores the rest, whining that,

I grieve over the latest example of how immorality is the new normal. Our only godly response is to continue speaking the truth in love and to pray for those whose hand may be caught in the cookie jar of sexual immorality when Jesus returns.

Once upon a time, Christianity was about as far from normative as you can get, as were Christianity’s concept of what is moral. The Pagan world had entirely different ideas about what was acceptable and the new cult violated all existing norms.

Well, Jennifer, the worm turns.

Gradually, we’re returning to a world where sex isn’t evil, where marriage is a social contract rather than a form of evangelization, and where loving somebody of the same sex doesn’t make you the spawn of Satan. The Religious Right is going to have to get used to this new world. Nobody is asking them to live lifestyles they don’t approve of after all. We’re just asking them to do as Jesus instructed, and turn the other cheek and being careful about casting the first stone.

Because hate can never be love, though, as Honey Maid has shown, hate can be returned as love.


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