Seattle based online mega-retailer Amazon.com released a new commercial last week for its Kindle Paperwhite. What makes this ad so remarkable is not the product Amazon is hawking but the story it tells within the 30-second spot.
A man is having trouble reading on a tablet of some sort when a woman sits down next to him reading the Kindle. A conversation ensues which ends with the man saying "We should celebrate." The woman responds, "My husband is bringing me a drink right now." The man says, "So's mine," and the ad cuts to two guys at a bar in the distance waving at the main characters.
The fact that Amazon is featuring a same-sex married couple in an ad is great in and of itself. Where the commercial really shines is that although the "punchline" of the commercial is the "two husbands," there is a casual acceptance within the universe of the commercial that all husbands are created equal; especially when they are fetching their spouses a drink. The commercial treats the situation as humorous rather than shocking.
This casual mainstreaming of same-sex marriage is an important step toward the almost unconscious acceptance most Americans now have toward interracial marriage. An aggregation of Gallup polls shows that 1958 only 7% of American approved of interracial marriage, by 1991 less than half the country disapproved and a 2012 Pew poll found that only 11% of Americans think that "intermarriage" has been "a change for the worse."
There are of course stigmas still attached to interracial marriage but overall society doesn't accept overt condemnation of it as it does with same-sex marriage. Hopefully, more companies will step up to support this and other social justice issues and help Americans face the reality that the country is diverse and diversity is good.
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