Preface:  Woo all right, go Saints.

Now, moving on, as you may have heard, CBS turned down a totally PG gay dating ad as being inappropriate to air during the Super Bowl.  This was of course total nonsense in and of itself; there was nothing inappropriate for public consumption going on there, especially considering some of the other ads that did make it on the air, and the fact that the much more controversial, and manifestly hateful group Focus on the Family did get their pro-life ad aired.  That said, a couple factors make the situation less of a clear-cut discrimination case.

Firstly, the Focus on the Family ad was so bland and vague as to be barely worth noting.  The only problem with it is that Focus on the Family exist at all and have the money to spend on a Super Bowl ad.  If you weren’t paying attention, you would have no idea that the ad was for anything controversial at all.

Second, there was other distinctly gay content on other ads, specifically in those by GoDaddy.com.  So the problem here is not that CBS doesn’t want to have gay stuff on their network, it’s that they’re a little picky about it.  However, it happens that there’s still a couple issues with the gay stuff they were for, as opposed to the stuff they were against.

In two GoDaddy ads, hot women were all about starting some “too hot for TV” makeouts with Danica Patrick.  On the one hand, not bad because hey, they’re saying sometimes women make out and that’s cool.  On the other, the fact that this was okay (even though it was implied rather than shown) while light-petting by two fully dressed guys was not feeds the girl-girl is okay because men find it sexy, boy-boy is bad because men find it gross standard.

In another, Danica ponders what the effect of a sexy picture of her on the internet would be, and one of the effects is two clearly gay men annoyed at each other - read: both members of this gay couple are both checking out the hot lady and they are as such jealous.  This shares a problem with the movie Chasing Amy in that it implies that gayness can always be overcome by the right opposite sex person, but it does have the potentially redeeming factor of showing gay people distinctly and without (overt) judgment of any kind, but not as the central point of anything, something that is generally missing from most media.

All in all, GoDaddy.com and CBS both come off as needing a distinct adjustment in their gay-o-meter, but at least we’ve come a little ways since some average dudes were grossed out by their own Snickers-inspired gayness during the Super Bowl.

Now, sexism in the ads, that’s a whole other story that makes me too mad to even start on.  So I’ll just leave on the note of the Budweiser commercial that made me tear up with happiness