‘We met every single stipulation that they asked for, and every time we met the line they moved the line further to request something else…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Fox Sports denied a pro-life advertisement, but accepted an advertisement featuring drag queens for this year’s Super Bowl.
The pro-life group, Faces of Choice, submitted an ad that featured the faces and stories of 14 abortion survivors, but Fox Sports reportedly blocked it, according to Lifesite News.
“We were one of the very first people to submit anything to them. We met every single stipulation that they asked for and every time we met the line they moved the line further to request something else,” Lyric Gillett, the founder of Faces of Choice, said.
Gillet said that after she submitted the advertisement, Fox said she would hear back by October, but no answer was given. The next time Gillet inquired, Fox told her all the slots had been filled, she said.
At one point, Fox even demanded that Faces of Choice submit information about everybody who donated to the ad—a request Gillet called “untenable,” but one she agreed to anyways.
“I think it’s very clever what they’re doing,” Gillett said. “If they directly said ‘no’ then we could say ‘this is asinine, look at the suitable ad that Fox rejected,’ but they haven’t directly said ‘no’—they’ve ignored us, wasted our time, refused to give an answer and refused to either give us clearance or simply say ‘no.'”
Two former contestants on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” however, will be featured in a Super Bowl ad for Sabra hummus products, according to NBC News. The ad will be “revolutionary” for the LGBT community, said LGBT marketing official Bob Witeck.
“For queer audiences, [drag] is an art form and an ‘outsiders’ language,” he said, according to NBC News. “Reaching the Super Bowl means taking our language into every home in the nation and millions around the world.”
Gillet said she hoped Fox would have given a similar platform to the “very voices almost stolen from them from the moment of conception.”
“Every single humanitarian effort, every civil rights effort that has actually made a difference has been through the voice of a survivor, and that is because the culture actually realized these people are human,” she told FaithWire.