Parents Fight Anti-Gay Yes On 8 “Exploitation”


Some California parents are royally – and understandably – pissed at the Yes on 8 campaign.

The campaign, which hopes to revoke gay citizens’ right to marry, recently ran the above ad in which they again claim that same-sex nuptials will infiltrate the public school system. And to prove their point, the commercial’s creators used news footage from a field trip in which students went to see their lesbian teacher get married – footage some parents say exploits their children. And now they’re fighting back:

The parents of the two children most prominently featured in the latest multi-million dollar Prop 8 political spot today termed those ads “distasteful and exploitative” and demanded that the ads be taken off the air immediately. Both sets of parents – Laura Hodder and Matt Alexander and Jen Press and James Moore, sent two hand-delivered letters this morning. The first letter is to the Prop 8 Campaign demanding the ad be removed from its television and its Web site where it is being used as a fund raising tool. The second letter to the San Francisco Chronicle asks them to intervene on their behalf.

In their letter to the Prop 8 campaign, the parents wrote: “We are absolutely outraged that you have chosen, without permission, to shamelessly hijack the images of our innocent children to promote a cause that we in no way, shape or form support. It is even more maddening that you have willfully and calculatingly edited the images of our children, with menacing music in the background, in a way that is completely contrary to their nature and harmful to them.”

The Yes on 8 campaign would like the public to believe gay people are bad for children, but it seems to us they’re far more dangerous and calculating than any queen we’ve encountered.

The parents held a news conference on the matter, which we’ve included below.

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