Cheerios Commercial: Gay dads adopt and sell cereal

Lorraine

Cringe making: A new feel-good Cherrios on-line commercial for the Canadian audience as two white gay dads talk about how they met, fell in love and decided to be a family by adopting a little black girl during a three-minute video. No doubt that Raphaelle she is being treated well, and that these two dads love her. 

We are supposed to feel all gooey-gooey about the fact that these two handsome, appealing men with charming French accents have been allowed to adopt. Problem Number One. We are all for gay acceptance, gay rights, gay marriage, but indisputable is the reality that gay and lesbian adoption will increase the number of people looking to adoption to build families. The unwitting result is more pressure on the adoption industry to find more babies from a dwindling market so that gay and lesbian couples can adopt somebody else's child. 

Cheerios video promotes gay equality but smacks of racism

Jane

There's a dark side to the Cheerios ad featuring a white gay Canadian couple with a darling little black girl, likely an American child, beyond the loss inherent in adoption. The ad smacks of colonialism, promoting the superiority of white homes as it promotes gay adoption.

The nearly three-minute video is of course intended to make us feel positive about Cheerios, manufactured by General Mills. While others have praised the ad for its positive image of gay men, how would the world feel about two gay black men raising a white baby? We seriously doubt it would have the same wide acceptance and elicit huzzahs from liberals. 

I'm not feeling my Cheerios in watching this ad, Actually I'm downright uncomfortable how the ad portrays adoption as sugar and spice and everything nice just like Cheerios.

Selling underwear, promoting adoption

Does adoption sell underwear? I was just about to hit "Buy Now" on my Jockey bra order, when I saw the plea: "Give $1 today and bring comfort to adoptive families tomorrow" and a link to "Jockey Being Family." At the site I learned that "Jockey Being Family is our company's commitment to help strengthen adoptive families for successful futures."  Jockey has donated more than $3.5 million to adoption organizations.

Well I thought, maybe this is okay. Families that adopt hard to place children need all the help they can get. But then I saw this: Jockey offers best-in-class adoption benefits to employees. The adoption process can be costly and time-intensive. At Jockey, we're proud to provide an extensive adoption benefits package to our employees including a $10,000 stipend per child each year and resource and referral services."(Emphasis added.)

Simone Biles' commotion over her (adoptive) parents

Simone at work

Simone Biles, one of the stars of the Olympics, is at the source of a huge kerfuffle regarding what adoptive parents deem as acceptable language when it comes to them. Al Trautwig, a NBC commentator, referred to her briefly by saying she was raised by her grandfather and his wife and she calls them mom and dad. He also said that she was adopted by them. He also tweeted: “They may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet.

Well, you'd think that he had thrown out a bomb. It was bold, I'll admit and I wonder what prompted him to go that far--that is, CAP the NOT. Maybe he was being nudged to diminish or hide her back story, and he said, Wait a minute, that's not the true story. Maybe he is the biological father of a child who was adopted. Maybe he wanted to raise his own child and was denied that. Or maybe, he had already been criticized for acknowledging that she was adopted by her grandfather and step-grandmother and he was irritated by the sensitive souls who had taken offense and were already complaining about hearing the truth, a prospect that I as a journalist find plausible. Who knows?