Do You Like Cheerios? No Matter, You will Love The Cheerios Gay Couple Personal Story
General Mills/YouTube
Over the past few years, General Mills has positioned itself as something like the anti-Chick-fil-A, celebrating LGBT pride and vehemently opposing Minnesota’s proposed gay marriage ban. All of that is very nice—but come on, this is 2014. If you’re a food company and you haven’t made an adorable ad featuring a gay couple with their children, you’re just another face in the pro-gay corporate crowd.
Luckily, General Mills has now decided to get with the program, releasing a commercial with a gay couple, their adopted daughter, and a bowl of Cheerios. And the ad is just as impossibly cute as you might expect.
As you can probably tell by AndrĂ© and Jonathan’s thick Quebecois accents, the ad was made for Canadian audiences; perhaps General Mills is still wary of U.S. consumers given the racist furor that arose from a recent Cheerios ad featuring an interracial family. Either way, the Canadian commercial hits all the right notes, from its precious message (“We couldn’t keep all of this luck and love for ourselves”) to its political undertones. “If RaphaĂ«lle has a problem [with having] two dads,” Jonathan tells us, “it’s not going to be our fault”—implying, of course, that only hateful outsiders could convince RaphaĂ«lle that it’s somehow wrong to have two fathers.
Jonathan is absolutely right about that: The primary disadvantage that the children of gay parents face is the shame foisted upon them by conservatives. It’s ads like these—a little sentimental, sure, but still absolutely necessary—that lessen that shame a bit more every day. Well done, General Mills.
Mark Joseph Stern is a writer for Slate. He covers science, the law, and LGBTQ issues.
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