UPDATE from Yesterday: Australia Condom Ad Restored!
by Linda S. Carbonell
Monday night in Australia, there were only 4,000 friends on a Facebook page to restore a bus shelter ad for HIV prevention. Within 24 hours, there were 60,000 and the ad company had agreed to restore the very inoffensive ads. The Australian Christian Lobby, which had forced the removal of the ads, had insisted that the anti-ad campaign was “a massive groundswell of people power.” They just found out what people power really is.
In a statement, ADSHEL CEO Steve McCarthy said “It has now become clear that ADSHEL has been the target of a coordinated ACL campaign. This has led us to review our decision to remove the campaign and we will therefore reinstate the campaign with immediate effect.”
Wendy Francis, spokeswoman for ACL, said “I’ve been labeled homophobic. This has absolutely nothing to do with gay couples. This has nothing to do with anything other than another condom ad in a bus shelter, where the children are catching busses to school and billboards where their parents are stopping at lights. I will continue to fight sexual imagery in our outdoor advertising until we can get it removed.”
Sexual, huh? Let’s review that ad a moment. Did you notice the wedding ring, by the way? The words “rip and roll” and two foil-sealed condoms. Yup, that’s really, really sexual. The thing about kids is, they only see “sexual imagery” if their parents have pointed it out to them. There is this really old Ringo Starr movie about cavemen. In it, the old, blind caveman walks into the belly of a T-Rex. The T-Rex had no visible genitalia, but some parents made the T-Rex anatomically correct in their heads and when the blind man stroked the dinosaur’s belly, they saw sexual contact. The kids didn’t. They saw the same thing that happens when you rub a dog’s belly – one very happy animal.
Francis is insisting that just because she sees something sexual in a foil-sealed package, little children will also see it. The sex is in her head, not the kids’ heads. Francis is the one with the prurient mind, not the children. She’s the pervert because she cannot see a foil package without having her mind jump to sex. She can’t see two people hugging without imagining them naked and going at it. The whole world is supposed to ban any image that might, just might, sexually excite her and she can’t handle that.
She’s right, this isn’t about homosexuality. It’s about the culture in fundamentalist Christianity that creates sexual perverts like herself, people whose brains are so fixated on sex they can’t see or hear anything without attaching a sexual image to it. Imagine what they see when they look at a painting of Christ.
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