Saturday, August 30, 2008

make an effort



Residents of St. Paul who happen to be queer: Don't make out in front of the Republicans attending the GOP Convention. You can identify delegates because they'll be wearing power ties.

On the one hand, the message of this ad seems to be that Republicans have horrible gaydar. On the other hand, it seems to be that Republicans are so intolerant that they won't even be able to handle the residents of a city they're visiting. I'm not going to make any argument about both or either of these being true, but I'm really intrigued by the ads. I can't imagine that they're doing much to discourage PDAs, especially among what's been a pretty politically active lgbtq community.

The organization responsible for the ads, the Unconvention, is a non-partisan group involved in participatory culture. The slogan is "unscripting the political process." To me, it seems like a kind of less interesting version of Otpor.