Puppies That Moo and Babies Who Listen to Tori Amos

The Gill Foundation is socking it to my town of Colorado Springs with a $900,000 campaign to "spark conversation" on homosexuality. Spearheading its media effort is a TV ad that tells the story of Norman, a dog that moos instead of woofs because "he was born different". This is meant as an analogy (though not a very good one) for the idea that people are born gay, but most folks couldn't tell just by the commercial alone.

The Born Different campaign claims that it's merely concerned with inciting discussion, not offering scientific proof about natural homosexuality. But that claim should puzzle you once you've perused their rather contentious Web site.

Hold on, let me get something out of the way:

I'm a theater-geek English major who spent a year living with four gay roommates: I know more gay folks than most gay folks. And to just state my current position and move on, my experiences and conversations lead me to believe that homosexuality is a combination of nature and nurture, and not a sin.

That's so you know where I'm at, but today I'm not going to focus on the ideas behind the Mooing Puppy but rather Focus on the Family's amusing response to it.

Instead of making any claim (at least in this particular spot) that even mentions gay rights, borndifferent.org has laid down a trump by superficially emphasizing the message "accept people who are different from you." See, you can't argue directly against that without sounding like a hateful prick, and that's just what makes it a winner in this case.

It's the same tactic behind naming the anti-abortion position "pro-life", or its opponents calling their camp "pro-choice". You're not anti-life, are you? If not, then you must be anti-choice... right? This sort of thing enables each side to hide behind its rhetorical wall and lob arguments past each other, making the debate hopelessly perpetual.

But Focus and other evangelical groups apparently don't see the trap that's laid out for them with Norman the Mooing Dog. With their expectedly direct attack on the ad, these guys are playing right into Born Different's hands by introducing Sherman the Dog That Woofs, Goddammit, Because Dogs Woof, Not Moo. It has that hateful-prickness, but by repeating the obvious without really addressing the issue, Focus ends up sounding more ridiculous than their opponents. But that's always been their style of debate ("marriage is between a man and a woman") and it does work on some people.

Still, some Christian parents are up in arms about Norman because they feel they can't keep their children safe from the ad's allegorical homosexual propaganda.

But this is a joke -- because the kids. Don't know. What the fuck. It's about.

They don't. Children don't know that Norman the Mooing Dog symbolizes homosexuals any more than they know Boxer from Orwell's Animal Farm represents the socialist proletariat. If kids are going to get its social implications, they have to ask Mommy and Daddy for them (assuming they're interested in anything beyond plot). Subsequently the parents can choose whether to tell them about Born Different's intended message or about the dire consequences of genetic bovine/canine hybridization. Their call. But that whole scenario is Born Different's intention in the first place. Oh, how sneaky!

What confuses me is how no one seemed to notice a previous TV spot from the Gill Foundation that could hardly be accused of sneakiness. This ad consisted of a gradual closeup on an infant while the female voiceover told us that this child was destined for a different life "because he was born gay." The spot had the rhetorical subtlety of a sledgehammer, and yet it failed to draw any pathos in the way of newspaper articles, letters to the editor, even watercooler talk for all I know.

I can understand someone feeling they were "subjected" to that heavy-handed ad, but by that same token the Mooing Dog must be doing these folks a favor by being so indirect. And while Norman's story has its obvious appeal to children, they still don't get it. It doesn't even have a subliminal impact on a kid's views of homosexuality, unless it has an intermittantly flashing frame of GAYS ARE BORN THAT WAY that I'm just not seeing. It just seems as if some parents are overestimating their tykes' ability to extract political allegory from a 20-second commercial.

I don't blame parents for being sensitive to what messages their offspring absorb everyday through the media -- that's their job and it only gets more difficult to do each year. But there comes a point where parents can project so much of their own gut reactions onto kids that it shatters logic.