Shameful Advertising

I've been too busy, too distracted, too...elsewhere to post these past few days. Haven't even visited this site to check on my stats, which tells you something. But I'm here now...because of something I saw on someone else's site.

It was the site of a friend of mine, someone I've known for years...or, rather, someone I thought I knew. But then, today, when I went to her site, there it was...a "Vote Yes on Prop 8" ad from Google Adsense.

I was, to be honest, a little bit sickened. I've tried to stay away from talking politics here, because it just never ends well. But working to defeat Prop 8 means a lot to me, and I'm not shy about saying so. In the same way that I don't think marriage should be based on sexual preference, I don't think that roundly and soundly rejecting Prop 8 needs to be based on sexual preference, either. I can be straight and think that a movement to legislate the way in which two people are allowed express their love and commitment to each other is hateful and discriminatory...and I do. I find the whole "Yes on 8" movement deeply, personally, upsetting and offensive. And while I've made some version of peace with those friends who I know disagree with me, this person wasn't one of them. I thought we were of like minds on this. I thought I knew her. Seeing that ad on her site unsettled me. It threw me off. It made me...well, it made me angry. I kept having imaginary conversations with her in my head, challenging her to go and tell our mutual friends--our mutual gay friends--why their relationship is any less real, any less worthy of being made 'official'--than mine or hers. I was pissed.

It took a while for me to start to wonder if maybe I was missing something. Nah, couldn't be. I mean, I have Adsense on my blog, too, and all it took was a click of a button when I first signed up to tell them that I didn't want any Republican political ads on my blog. Why didn't she do the same? Didn't she realize that this would be the end result...that her site could be used to promote the very things she fights against? How could she be so...stu...

Uh oh. Oh, no. No. Nonononono. It couldn't be. Could it? Could the fact that the Prop 8 issue in California isn't a straightforward Republican versus Democrat issue mean that it wasn't covered by that checkbox in my original agreement with Google?

Yes. Yes, that's precisely what it did mean. Because there it was, in all its offensive glory, the moral equivalent of me walking into my synagogue with a swastika on my arm. An ad, on my blog, urging people to "protect marriage."

Oh, god. I feel sick.

So, here and now, is my official apology: If you're a Californian and you have been to this site in the last few days...and if when you were here you saw this absolutely-contrary-to-everything-I-believe-in ad...and if seeing it upset you, angered you, made you begin to reconsider what you thought you knew about me--as it did when I saw it on my friend's site--I apologize. It's my responsibility to watch for these things...It's my blog, and I'm the one who chose to start putting ads on it. The good news is that I can also pull those ads. Google AdSense has been removed from my blog, and it will not be returning.

I can't wait for this all to be over. There's just way too much ugliness mixed in with all that hope.