With the first pro-marriage equality President’s reelection vote and four states’ referenda coming up in less than 40 days, the ad war over equality is heating up. ThinkProgress has put together a handy guide to some of the misleading and false claims that you’ll see on the airwaves from now until November 6th.
First up, an advertisement from “God Said,” an anti-Obama group whose avowed goal is splitting African-American voters from the President:
Aside from its nakedly theocratic appeal and false implication that religious African-Americans uniformly oppose equality, the ad’s basic contention is that gay couples can’t fulfill the biblical mandate to “be fruitful and multiply.” Ostensibly that would also mean sterile couples who adopt children shouldn’t be able to get married either, but thankfully this highly literal view of Biblical marriage is by no means universally shared among people of faith.
The next ad, from Washington State’s anti-equality group PreserveMarriage, picks up on the theme that gay families aren’t real marriages:
Of course, it is about equality: civil unions are a separate-but-unequal solution that fails to provide full equality for LGBT couples. Moreover, the ad’s suggestion that equality has led to the legal persecution of anti-gay churches is not only false, but also a means of shifting the debate away from the rights owed to LGBT Americans as free and equal citizens.
The final ad, from Maryland, goes all-in on the “equality hurts children” argument:
There is no credible evidence that same-sex parenting hurts children and a wealth of evidence suggesting it doesn’t.
The transparent weakness of the arguments in these ads against marriage equality helps explain the massive swing in public opinion over the past few years — anti-equality advocates simply have nothing persuasive to say to the majority of Americans who solidly support marriage equality.