“Real Couples” Campaign Pushes back Against Real Gay and Lesbian Parents
Anti-gay marriage activists are using Facebook and billboards to communicate their distaste forsame-sex marriage.
One of the photos published by Bethel TV for the "Real Couples" campaign. (Photo: Bethel TV/Facebook)
Anti-same sex marriage activists are rejecting recent gay rights initiatives and pushing back with a media campaign of their own.
In November, billboards promoting gay rights appeared across the city of Lima. The campaign, called Imaginary Couples, (“Parejas Imaginarias”), featured heterosexual celebrities posing as same-sex couples engaged in everyday activities. The billboards bore the slogan “To love is not a crime.”
Now, an anti-gay marriage group has launched a counter-initiative— the “Real Couples” campaign. Their Facebook page, which has almost 40,000 likes as of now, features a number of user-submitted photos of heterosexual couples and their children, most of which indicate how long the couple has been married and the ages of said children.
Their campaign has apparently found support with Christian television station Bethel Television, who have paid for multiple billboards featuring “real couples.” These billboards seem to have been designed very intentionally to mimic the style of the “Imaginary Couples” campaign.
All of these posters feature straight couples posing with their children and are captioned with the names of the couple and their children, arranged as an equation: one, for example, reads “Wilian + Karen = Mia and Hally.” “Real Couples,” the poster says, “The love that gives life.”
El Comercio reported in November that the Facebook page is run by seven anonymous people between the ages of 23 and 28 who say they are from a number of different cities.
According to El Comercio, one of the reasons they object to the “Imaginary Couples” campaign is because they don’t believe that it’s meant to fight homophobia, but rather to promote gay marriage, which they oppose.
Speaking to El Comercio, members of the group maintained that “We’re not homophobic, we value homosexual people, we respect them and we think that they deserve to he happy as human beings, like we all are.”
However, they still don’t support same-sex unions: “[M]arriage isn’t something you do on a whim, or something you do for personal satisfaction, it’s an institution that is naturally made up of a woman and a man. That’s what’s real, whether we like it or not,” says the group.
They also say that their motivation doesn’t come from any one faith, as they themselves practice different religious traditions. “There are people who celebrate their religious marriage, others who celebrate their civil marriage, or their engagement or their relationship as boyfriends and girlfriends. There are Mormons, Catholics, Evangelicals, of all sorts, who all have it clear in their conscience: marriage is an institution formed by a man and a woman,” they explain.
Interestingly, another campaign called “Real Couples” was launched in November of 2013 as well. However, the campaign did not oppose the original message of the “Imaginary Couples” campaign— quite the contrary. This “Real Couples” campaign wanted to promote gay rights by publishing photos of existing gay couples, not just straight celebrities pretending to be gay. It is unclear if the anti-same sex marriage “Real Couples” campaign is aware of the coincidence.
By Rachel Chase
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